1Password might be causing sound hiccups in Windows 8.1 [Caused by Norton's recent update]

I've noticed a strange problem in Windows that might be related to 1Password. When I click on a login in the 1Password browser extension on Chrome, to fill the username and password fields on a web-site, I get a small hiccup in any sound that's being played back on my PC. I get another hiccup when I click the login button on the web-site. I only get the sound hiccups during these two cases.

@pbryanw: Indeed. 1Password doesn't let your data sit there, unencrypted, in memory. When you take these actions it must decrypt it so you can get something usable.

If you've got onboard audio or a dongle, it's certainly possible — even probably — that cryptography would cause a brief resource drain. After all, that's the point! Anything IO intensive (such as 1Password decrypting or encrypting data) is going to pull resources from the CPU...which is what's doing much (if not all) of the sound processing when you don't have dedicated audio hardware to accelerate it, offloading it from the CPU. I struggled with issues like this in Windows for years, and unfortunately they are still with us.

I'm using an Audioengine D3 USB DAC for sound, with a wireless connection. Connecting by ethernet doesn't make a difference. I've also tried ending any 1Password processes in task manager and that seems to fix things but as the problem is intermittent, and I haven't tested with 1Password closed for very long, I still don't know if it's 1Password that's the problem and why it would be interfering with the sound?

It sounds like the driver (software) is doing most of the work here, or it wouldn't make any difference if the CPU was under load. It may be that this does not happen every time you unlock 1Password, since it may be that another process has to be stressing the CPU at the same time to produce skipping.

Since 1Password isn't directly accessing your audio hardware/software (it doesn't access your devices at all, Windows handles all of that), there really isn't anything we can do about that. Simply updating your drivers may help though (if they've gotten reliability or efficiency fixes). Otherwise you won't have any trouble so long as you're not taxing the CPU when something else (such as internet radio) needs it. But why these apps aren't buffering audio to prevent skips, even in the case of a network spike, is beyond me.