Steam WEBhelper opening excessive amounts of instances.

[Dick Lipton]

Alrighty, folks, I've got an issue here. I recently had Fallout 4 open, and at the same time I was scrolling around the Paint The Town Red community tab, and played a video of some russian kid playing a simpsons map. I clicked the title of the video, attempting to open it in my browser so I could send it to someone and comment on it, and I clicked it quite a few times, and instead of opening up in my browser, the audio of the video replayed an uncountable amount of times. Now every time I open Fallout 4, the audio of that video plays probably 40 times, all at once, and I have to task manager steam twice in order to stop it. Another thing I've noticed is when I open Fallout 4, due to the videos audio playing multiple times, Steam Client WebHelper opens anywhere from 22 - 37 instances of itself, and I have to close them all individually, or steam just restarts itself due to me playing the game, along with the sometimes 30 instances of Steam Client Webhelper. This is a very strange occurrence, something I've never experienced before, and want to get someone's advice. I'm starting to think I should probably just uninstall and reinstall steam. I'm fairly certain all my game files will be safe, but I am not 100% sure, and have not been able to find ANY information on this, as I am going to guess I am the only person who has ever used steam who has run into this problem. If not, and in the case someone has some kind of answer to my problem here, please don't hesitate to post something, as I could really use the help. Thanks.

[7IПFΉ_]

What is your PC's spec?

[Crashed]

Try closing as many Steam windows as possible before launching FO4 and disabling the in-game overlay.

[Joke]

If you uninstall Steam, all steam games will uninstall as well.
Backup things if you choose to do this.

[Crashed]

Originally posted by Joke:

If you uninstall Steam, all steam games will uninstall as well.
Backup things if you choose to do this.

You can do an aggressive cleanup of the Steam Client by doing the following:

1. Close Steam
   
2. Go to the Steam installation folder
   
3. Delete all files except for steam.exe, steamapps, and userdata
   
4. Restart Steam and log back in

[Dick Lipton]

Originally posted by Crashed:

Originally posted by Joke:

If you uninstall Steam, all steam games will uninstall as well.
Backup things if you choose to do this.

You can do an aggressive cleanup of the Steam Client by doing the following:

1. Close Steam
   
2. Go to the Steam installation folder
   
3. Delete all files except for steam.exe, steamapps, and userdata
   
4. Restart Steam and log back in
[/quote]Appreciate the tip here, I'll give it a shot and get back to you.

[Dick Lipton]

Originally posted by Crashed:

Try closing as many Steam windows as possible before launching FO4 and disabling the in-game overlay.

The problem here is, I only have the one steam window with about 2 webhelpers, which I have been informed is how many there is supposed to be. What's insane is I will launch Fallout, and today about 70 instances of the webhelper kept reappearing, and after around 12 times of task managering steam itself, and it automatically rebooting, it finally stopped. I'll try disabling the overlay though and let you know how it goes.

[Dick Lipton]

Originally posted by ♥♥♥♥ Lipton:

Originally posted by Crashed:

You can do an aggressive cleanup of the Steam Client by doing the following:

1. Close Steam
   
2. Go to the Steam installation folder
   
3. Delete all files except for steam.exe, steamapps, and userdata
   
4. Restart Steam and log back in
[/quote]Appreciate the tip here, I'll give it a shot and get back to you. Where would I find such a folder, I am looking for it, but where should I go to get to the steam installation folder ?

[Joke]

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam

[Dick Lipton]

Dude I really can't thank you people enough for being willing to help me on this. I assumed my problem was to obscure or would get lost in the rest of the forums. You guys are cool as hell. And thanks again.

[LieutenantBaconWaffles]

Thanks. I had like 40 instances of webhelper running in the background. Every time I tried to terminate one in Task Manager, it would open STEAM (which I wasn't using in the first place, it was just open in the background after starting my computer) & every time I nixed one instance of Webhelper, 3 more would appear, like trying to cut the head off a Hydra.

[Crompton33119]

Hi all
sorry to drag this up.
start PC, not started any games, just standard windows desktop with task manager running.

i got (at present time) 8 Steam Client WebHelper runing using 250MB of memory, 1% of CPU time, and Disk activity keeps showing action.

What is this doing?
Why is it running?

ok ask another way, i do not have Excel running 250mb in the background.
i do not have Explorer running 250mb in the background.
i do not have microsoft solitaire running 250mb in the background.

so why Steam Client WebHelper running?

David.

[7IПFΉ_]

@David
Abnormal behaviour could be the result of many different things, taking into account I can't pinpoint it from here. I need the process ID's etc. but I do have temporary solutions like...

1. Reinstall Steam / Update (might be cache)
2. Do you use your Steam chromium often? (Chromium & Edguim have safety features that blocks malicious extensions from running in the background that the Steam version lacks for example.)
3. Disable the steam startup process in steam or task manager.
4. Is this recurring or a single event?
5. Disable in system services and see if the program behaves accordingly.

Hope this helps

[76561199104398073]

I had the same problem. Steam was behaving like a virus, filling the whole screen and as fast as I could close the steam webhelper, another would start up, obviously some sort of glitch.

Steam support gave me no help at all. In fact they treated me like a criminal because I had changed my e-mail address since I registered my account. 🤢

Finally I manaaged to reinstate my old e-mail. I backed up my game folder, (just in case) and reinstalled steam to the same location using the link at the top of this page. Turns out that I didnt need the backup nor did I need to delete any files. When I restarted steam it all was OK and my game worked just fine.

It worked for me, I hope it works for you too 🤞❤

[Iceira]

Originally posted by Morgane:

I had the same problem. Steam was behaving like a virus, filling the whole screen and as fast as I could close the steam webhelper, another would start up, obviously some sort of glitch.

Steam support gave me no help at all. In fact they treated me like a criminal because I had changed my e-mail address since I registered my account. 🤢

Finally I manaaged to reinstate my old e-mail. I backed up my game folder, (just in case) and reinstalled steam to the same location using the link at the top of this page. Turns out that I didnt need the backup nor did I need to delete any files. When I restarted steam it all was OK and my game worked just fine.

It worked for me, I hope it works for you too 🤞❤

All you said here, dont make any sense to ppl that know how steam work, and what webhelper accues them for virus aient a cleaver way to say why it fetch data.

You have not read other post at all, any helper can tell you this. there is post with how many MB it take or worst case a gb or more. but somehow you dont seem to knwo this, fater so many yesr with it.

You might think we are rude here, but you cant come years later and dont know expanding webhelper and then use that as explanation as this is something new.

this post is from 2022, even that shold tell you how things has been in a long time now.

gl with read what you can do about. from 2022, so many post with this.

if i was steam moderator this post was closed the minute you post in it.
this is a necro post.


i can also say you have time to write in old post, then you also have time to read solution about it in post from the past and onwards.