BD Premium VPN and Steam App for Windows not starting

aussiemozzie

I have been using Steam for Windows for decades and Bitdefender Premium VPN for about 2 years. Over that time both haven't caused me any problems until a few months ago. Firstly after finishing playing any Steam games the Steam Cloud has an error and says it cannot update. So before I turn off my PC I disable the VPN and manually resave to Steam Cloud.

Now in the past few weeks Steam refuses to start now, it gives an error message regarding unable to start and to try restarting. Around that time I added the Steam App into the VPN advanced Split-Tunneling and that seemed to work for about a week. Over the past week Steam now wont start at all, even with the Steam app listed in the VPN Split-Tunneling. Do I need to add another Steam related app in this list as well?

Anyone have any ideas? Currently I an disabling the BD VPN temporarily so I can start Steam, then restart BD VPN. Any games I play work fine, they just won't backup to the Steam cloud after stopping the game.

As I said above Steam and BD VPN never gave me any trouble for over a year until these annoying errors which started over the past few months. Thanks for your time.

Alexandru_BD

Hello,

I think it's possible that Split-tunneling doesn't work effectively here because Steam may have multiple executables or services. Since it was working fine before, this can also be caused by Steam client or Bitdefender VPN updates which perhaps introduced compatibility changes recently…

I would start by adding all Steam-related processes to the Split-tunneling exclusion list. For example:

steam.exe – main launcher (I assume this one is added already)
steamservice.exe – required background service
GameOverlayUI.exe – manages in-game overlay and connections
steamwebhelper.exe – used for login and community features

Path example: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\

In any case, your current workaround sounds fine to me, you can launch Steam with VPN off, then turn VPN on later. If cloud sync is the main issue, make this change permanent: disable VPN for steam.exe and steamservice.exe only. Enable it for everything else. This allows Steam to authenticate and sync, while keeping most of your traffic private.

Another thing to keep in mind, Steam may reject cloud sync if your VPN endpoint is too far from your actual region (for anti-cheat or fraud prevention). Switching to a VPN server in your own country or region may help.

If nothing here helps, let me know and we can dive into more advanced troubleshooting.

Regards