It’s Friday night, and my Windows 11 computer was sleeping for the past five hours. I unlocked the computer and got a Windows notification of “Bitwarden - Restart to update.” Apparently, version 2026.1.1 was ready to install.
I clicked “Close,” and the BW desktop popped up its own dialog, saying “Restart to update.” I clicked “Restart” and waited for about 90 seconds, but nothing happened, so finally I clicked the icon in the task bar and I opened BW. After logging in, I got another Windows notification, leading to a BW dialog. This appears to be an infinite loop.
Annoyed after several iterations, I finally downloaded a fresh install and tried to run it. It claimed that BW is still running, even though my taskbar claimed otherwise. I tried “Retry” a couple of times and still got the same thing. Finally, I opened Task Manager, and discovered three orphan BW processes. I killed them manually, then told the installed to retry, and it gave an error message.
I ended the installer and tried it again, and finally, it succeeded and now my BW desktop appears to be updated to 2026.1.1.
Why did I have to go through all this? Why didn’t the update installer deal with the orphaned tasks and just do its job?