Tiny Tip – Fixed: Update Problem with 1Password 7

I wouldn’t normally post a tip about a specific problem with a specific piece of software, but when my father-in-law ran into the exact same problem updating 1Password, I figured maybe it’s a widespread problem and I know we have a lot of 1Password-loving friends in the NosillaCastaway community.

There appears to be a problem fully quitting 1Password in the version immediately before 7.4.1 from the Mac App Store. When I saw the update come in, I hit the update button in the Mac App Store. As always happens, it tried and then came back and explained that it needed to quit 1Password since I had it running. I allowed the Mac App Store to quit the app, but it didn’t work.

I quit 1Password myself, but still no joy. I then went into Activity Monitor and discovered that while 1Password itself was not running, the helper app was still running. No problem, I force quit the helper app in Activity Monitor. But it didn’t die!

Now it was a challenge. I opened up the terminal and I did a kill -9 all over that helper app using its process ID. But the helper app was a zombie – it came back with a new process ID! I tried 3 times without successfully killing it off.

I finally gave up and wrote to Agile Bits, the fine developers of 1Password, and my little friend Zak wrote back 14 minutes later with the following:

If you open your current installation of 1Password 7, you can use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Option+Cmd+Q to quit it completely. That should allow you to install the latest update, which in turn should resolve this issue in the future.

And it worked like a champ. When my father-in-law called with the same problem, Steve gave him the command and it worked for him too. Steve didn’t have the problem and neither did his mom, and we’re wondering if it’s just the managers of the family plans that can have this problem. Or maybe Ken and I were just really unlucky.

In any case, the problem being resolved in the future after the successful update was really good news. Agile Bits was on top of this for me, and if you get plagued with the same problem, I hope this tiny tip will save a support call for you and for them!