Under Win 7, there are 4 chrome.exe in the Task manager with 3 tabs opened though I have not checked while in WinXP

Background process ? Could be a lot of things.

With no extensions, just loading my CNT (safaridial) shows 2 chrome.exe processes.

With extensions, loading the same page, shows 4 processes.

Change the page to this forum, it spawns another process (5 at this point).

Open up a new tab, 6.

Chrome creates 3 types of processes; browsers, renderers and plug ins ...

So basically opening Chrome you will always have at least two and that will increase the more tabs you have open ...

By default it opens in 'process per site' mode which means you will have a process for each Domain you are visiting ...

This explains it better than me ...

http://blog.chromium.org/2008/09/mul...hitecture.html