“Error -- An instance of Bitwarden Desktop is already running.”

Can the error popup “Error - an instance of Bitwarden Desktop is already running.” be removed again?

The way I access Bitwarden is to hit the Windows key, type “bitw” and hit , which will either 1) launch Bitwarden if it wasn’t running yet, or 2) bring the window to the front, or 3) open the window if Bitwarden was minimized to the system tray. So, regardless of the state of my system, one quick and simple action to access Bitwarden.

Up till yesterday any of those three routes would just take me to the application, and while it still does that, it now also pops up an error dialog in the latter two cases, which is quite annoying ‘coz it adds the extra step of having to close it. (Also note that double-clicking the Bitwarden shorcut on my Desktop is affected in the same way.)

@jag Welcome to the forum!

This was discussed in this bug report (and a fix seems to be in the works):

PS: Ah, and since this is a separate topic, and not associated to that particular release cycle, I moved it out of the Release Notes.

Ah, thanks for the github link.

Makes sense. Besides, it was introduced before 2026.2.0 and is hopefully fixed in it, so this definitely didn’t belong there (oops!)

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