Testcomplete doesn't recognize browser objects, but recognizes non-browser objects.

do i have those processes running? yes, although they look different on my task manager that what your screenshot shows

is the smartbear extension installed? Yes. it looks like this (Version 14.0.0).

I'm launching the browser with Run Browser in the Item column and Chrome in the Operation column and my applications credentials URL in the Value column. i did as eykxas suggested and added chrome as a generic tested app. however, when i expand the object tree for a very brief time i can start to expand the Page (some url) entry as shown in this screenshot 

but a few seconds later it vanishes down to just this

and all i'm left with is the BrowserWindow(0) in the tree. 

i don't know if i mentioned this before but I began having to "fix" these automation scripts because all of a sudden all of the originally recorded ClickItem operations related to selecting  something from a drop down box began failing and the only solution I could come up with was to replace them with the Keys operation with a value that reflected the first letter of the desired selection. of course, if there were multiple sections starting with the same letter my keys would have to look something like this:

Keys("SSS") 

to get to the third selection starting with "S". In one case where i needed to select a prior to the current year (which appeared as the default value in the drop down) I had to use Keys("[Up]") because trying to enter Keys("22222.....") would have just gotten me eventually to the year 3000 before looping back to 2000 and going up again. As i was trying to fix those i started seeing a bunch of other object mappings that were no longer recognized from the original keyword test recordings

so if anyone know anything about why that might have started happening several weeks ago (and what would make ClickItem work again) that might be a better solution to my issue. Anyone?