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Codex Issues / #32690

Windows desktop app: enabling bundled Sites plugin causes infinite cmd.exe/node.exe spawn loop

Open 💬 2 comments Opened Jul 13, 2026 by forbreak
💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (github-actions[bot], contributor) responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.

What version of the Codex App are you using (From “About Codex” dialog)?

OpenAI.Codex_26.707.6957.0

What subscription do you have?

ChatGPT subscription (plan not specified)

What platform is your computer?

Microsoft Windows NT 10.0.26100.0 x64

What issue are you seeing?

Enabling the bundled Sites plugin causes the ChatGPT/Codex Windows desktop app to continuously launch large numbers of cmd.exe and node.exe processes. Windows becomes unresponsive and the app cannot be closed normally.

Observed: hundreds of cmd.exe instances beginning at app startup; a ChatGPT subprocess approached 1 GB private memory; diagnostics timed out or were denied while the system was overloaded.

What steps can reproduce the bug?

  1. In ~/.codex/config.toml, set [plugins."sites@openai-bundled"] enabled = true.
  2. Launch the ChatGPT/Codex desktop app on Windows.
  3. Observe cmd.exe and node.exe processes continuously spawning until Windows becomes unresponsive.

What is the expected behavior?

At most one stable MCP Node process should be started for the Sites design picker. The app must not repeatedly spawn cmd.exe/node.exe processes or consume system resources indefinitely.

Additional information

Bundled plugin version: sites@openai-bundled 0.1.27.

Workaround: set [plugins."sites@openai-bundled"] enabled = false. Immediately after disabling it, cmd.exe and node.exe process counts returned to 0 and the app became usable.

Plugin detail: .mcp.json starts node ./mcp/server.mjs. The server source contains no child_process usage or restart loop, suggesting an MCP-host startup/handshake retry loop on Windows.

View original on GitHub ↗

2 Comments

github-actions[bot] contributor · 1 month ago

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

  • #31499

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nalpadak · 1 month ago

I can consistently reproduce this issue and narrowed it down further.

Environment:

  • Windows 11 24H2
  • ChatGPT Desktop
  • Codex CLI 0.145.0
  • Volta installed via Scoop

The recursion only happens when node resolves to the Volta shim:

C:\Users\<user>\scoop\apps\volta\current\appdata\bin\node.exe

If I change PATH so that node resolves directly to:

C:\Users\<user>\scoop\apps\volta\current\appdata\tools\image\node\24.16.0\node.exe

or a normal Node installation (nodejs-lts),

the problem disappears immediately.

node ./mcp/server.mjs also works correctly when started manually.

This suggests the issue is not inside server.mjs itself but in the Windows MCP launcher interaction with the Volta shim.