Bundled marketplace under .tmp is repeatedly overwritten with incomplete contents, causing Chrome plugin to fail loading

Potential duplicates detected. Please review them and close your issue if it is a duplicate.

• #25758
• #25253

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I can confirm a very similar failure shape on Windows 26.601 as well.

Environment:

Codex Desktop: OpenAI.Codex_26.601.2237.0_x64__2p2nqsd0c76g0
Desktop/internal CLI: codex-cli 0.136.0-alpha.2
Bundled plugin version: 26.601.21317

Current good state after recovery:

[marketplaces.openai-bundled]
source_type = "local"
source = '\\?\%USERPROFILE%\.codex\.tmp\bundled-marketplaces\openai-bundled'

The critical file that determines whether openai-bundled is discoverable is:

%USERPROFILE%\.codex\.tmp\bundled-marketplaces\openai-bundled\.agents\plugins\marketplace.json

When that file and the bundled plugin folders are present, the Desktop/internal CLI sees the marketplace and Browser/Computer Use work:

MARKETPLACE             ROOT
openai-bundled          %USERPROFILE%\.codex\.tmp\bundled-marketplaces\openai-bundled

browser@openai-bundled       installed, enabled  26.601.21317
computer-use@openai-bundled  installed, enabled  26.601.21317
chrome@openai-bundled        not installed

Runtime validation from the same recovered session:

Browser: opened https://example.com/, title=Example Domain, expected heading found
Computer Use: list_apps succeeded with 40 apps, 5 running apps, 5 targetable windows
Computer Use: list_windows succeeded with 5 windows

Earlier in the same debugging sequence, opening/restarting Codex Desktop was the event that made bundled plugins disappear from Settings / plugin discovery. Reboot alone did not appear to erase them. Manually restoring/copying the bundled marketplace contents from the installed app package back into the .tmp\bundled-marketplaces\openai-bundled path restored discovery until the next time the transient marketplace became incomplete.

This lines up with the theory in this issue: Desktop appears to use .codex\.tmp\bundled-marketplaces\openai-bundled as both a generated/transient output and the registered marketplace source. If that directory is cleared or only partially written, consumers see a configured marketplace path but no valid .agents\plugins\marketplace.json, which makes bundled plugins look unavailable even though the app package still contains the full bundled marketplace.

Expected behavior from the user side: the Desktop-owned bundled marketplace should either live in a durable cache path, or the .tmp rewrite should be atomic/complete and fall back to the previous valid marketplace if materialization fails.

GitHub issue #25780 feedback draft

Validated follow-up workaround on Windows 11 / Codex Desktop 26.609.3341.0 (bundled plugins 26.609.30741).

The failure still appears related to incomplete bundled-marketplace materialization and Chrome native-host file locks. One stale Chrome cache had a latest junction targeting a deleted .tmp\bundled-marketplaces\openai-bundled\plugins\chrome directory.

A working split setup was:

• Keep computer-use@openai-bundled installed/enabled and do not clear its cache or change its helper path.
• Copy the complete official bundled marketplace from the installed app package to a durable user directory.
• Create a second local marketplace, openai-chrome-local, containing only Chrome.
• Write its marketplace.json as UTF-8 without BOM; Windows PowerShell Set-Content -Encoding UTF8 caused expected value at line 1 column 1.
• Install chrome@openai-chrome-local and re-enable the Codex Chrome Extension.

End-to-end runtime validation succeeded:

computer-use@openai-bundled  installed, enabled  26.609.30741
chrome@openai-chrome-local   installed, enabled  26.609.30741

Computer Use: launched Windows Notepad successfully
Chrome: opened https://example.com/ successfully
Title: Example Domain

Remaining bug: after setting chrome@openai-bundled disabled, Codex Desktop changed it back to enabled on startup. Plugin state may be synchronized by plugin name instead of full plugin@marketplace identity, so duplicate Chrome entries can reappear.

This is a workaround, not a permanent fix. The product still needs atomic marketplace replacement/fallback, recovery from partial snapshots, native-host lock handling, and consistent Settings/CLI/session state. Related: #26387.

I maintain WinBridge Recovery, an independent Windows-side recovery tool for Codex Desktop bundled-plugin state: https://github.com/zemeng5208/winbridge-recovery

This issue is a direct match for one of the failure modes the project is designed around: the Desktop-owned .tmp\bundled-marketplaces\openai-bundled tree is registered as the active source, then gets rewritten incompletely and loses the marketplace/plugin manifests while the official app package still contains the complete bundled plugins.

The recovery flow is version-aware. It detects the currently installed official Desktop package, validates/reconstructs the user-side bundled marketplace, reconciles versioned plugin caches and latest pointers, and checks related runtime/registration state. It also tries to stop the Chrome/Edge native-host lock from interfering with cache reconciliation. Backups, rollback, and post-repair consistency checks are included rather than doing an unconditional destructive cleanup.

It does not take ownership of or patch C:\Program Files\WindowsApps, and it does not redistribute official plugin files. It only reconstructs recovery state from the official package already installed on that machine.

This is a user-side recovery/workaround, not a replacement for the upstream fix requested here: the Desktop marketplace writer still needs atomic publication/fallback so a failed refresh cannot make a partial .tmp tree become the active marketplace.