That’s an awesome find! Though, Credential Manager in services.msc being set to “Manual” is actually how Windows is supposed to ship.
From Windows 11 25H2 that was just installed for the sole purpose of installing Brave “fresh” just a few days back:
Just to check real quick on a Windows 10 VM that too is rather freshly installed, I checked it as well:
So ultimately someone (this should be Google lol) needs to find out why that it being set to Manual, the Windows default (as my host is also manual and never has this problem), is causing issues for some users, when it actually shouldn’t be set to Automatic per Microsoft. (It’s still ultimately a Chromium problem, as Edge is affected too, along with Google Chrome upon research).
EDIT: Ok so setting this to Automatic leaves VaultSvc in RAM at boot, this is not a good idea because it leaves sensitive data possibly in RAM (possibly, this is why since Windows 7 this became a “Manual” service). It should be called upon, and a program wait, and then continue. Chromium appears actually to be expecting it to just be there and answer immediately and if it doesn’t, it fails. So it’s the timing, Chromium just isn’t waiting like it should.