Windows Hello stopped working

Just applied monthly updates to my Windows PC and found that my Bitwarden Chrome extension was no longer working with Windows Hello. I performed the following actions, one of which fixed it (Don’t know which one).

  1. In the Browser Extension (2025.12.0), I disabled biometrics and tried to reenable it, which failed with this message:

  2. Ensured my desktop app was unlocked. Opened desktop app (2025.12.0), locked it and validated I could unlock with Windows Hello.

  3. Unchecked “Settings >> Allow Browser Integration” in desktop app. Quit and restarted desktop app and again unlocked with Hello. Rechecked setting.

  4. Unchecked “Settings >> Account Security >> Unlock with Biometrics” in the browser extension.

  5. Disabled bitwarden extension in chrome://extensions/ .

  6. Attempted to update extension (I have “developer mode” enabled).

  7. Restarted Chrome

  8. Reenabled Bitwarden extension

  9. Checked “Settings >> Account Security >> Unlock with Biometrics” in the browser extension. Windows Hello prompted me to authenticate and then all was good.

If you encounter a similar problem (I have seen this before), try portions of the above and report back what worked for you (especially if we can trim the number of steps).

Unlike this post, I did not need to run anything as administrator.

Edit: struck out steps that proved unnecessary upon recurrence.

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After updating browser to 2025.12.01, desktop to 2025.12.1 and applying the latest windows updates, I rebooted my PC and again encountered this problem. This time, I was able to slightly more efficiently remediate the issue, so I updated the original post.

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