Windows: pet/avatar overlay makes task switching and mouse dragging freeze

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

• #33375
• #33518
• #33494
• #33525
• #33561

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Additional isolation results from my Windows setup:

• Codex Desktop: 26.707.12708.0
• Windows 11 Home 25H2, build 26200.8875
• With the Pet hidden/Default, Codex remains responsive.
• With the built-in Standard Pet visible, the cursor and desktop UI stutter during response generation and shortly after startup.
• The same behavior occurs with custom pets, so it does not appear to be specific to a custom pet asset or pet version.
• Windows Animation Effects / Reduced Motion did not resolve the stutter.
• With Codex fully closed, streaming a 50-line response on chatgpt.com in Chrome caused no stutter.
• ESET remained enabled, with SSL/TLS scanning ignored only for ChatGPT.exe.
• During this Pet-only reproduction, no serialport.node errors and no Event ID 1000/1001/1002 crashes were observed.

This suggests that the Pet/avatarOverlay rendering itself is sufficient to trigger the stutter, separately from the earlier ESET/serialport crash issue.

Expected behavior:
Keeping a Pet visible should not degrade cursor movement or desktop UI responsiveness.

Have this issue aswell

• Codex Desktop package: 26.715.2305.0
• Windows 11 Pro 25H2, build 26200.8875
• AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, Gigabyte X870E AORUS PRO, 32 GB RAM
• The issue began immediately after updating the Codex desktop app today.
• With the Pet hidden, or with Codex fully closed, mouse input remains smooth.
• With a Codex task actively running and the Pet visible, physical mouse input periodically freezes across the entire Windows desktop.
• Each freeze lasts approximately half a second and generally repeats around every 30 seconds.
• This is not limited to dragging inside Codex. It affects mouse movement and clicks in other applications and games as well.
• The rest of the system continues running during each stall. For example, a game continues rendering and character movement continues, but mouse movement and clicks are briefly ignored.
• The behavior reproduces with both a Logitech G Pro X Superlight 2 and a separate wired mouse, so it does not appear to be specific to the mouse, receiver, polling rate, or wireless connection.
• LatencyMon was running during one observed mouse stall and did not record a significant DPC or ISR latency spike, suggesting this is not a conventional whole-system driver latency stall.
• I also reproduced the issue after testing with non-Microsoft startup services disabled and after ruling out several unrelated mouse, RGB, and hardware-monitoring components.

This appears consistent with the Pet/avatar overlay triggering periodic system-wide input stalls specifically while an agent task is active. In my case, it is not limited to slow rendering or task switching within the Codex window.

Expected behavior:

Keeping the Pet visible while a task runs should not interrupt physical mouse input or degrade responsiveness elsewhere in Windows.

I’m experiencing the same severe mouse lag and performance problems when Codex Pets is enabled.

My system is a Windows 11 desktop/tower PC with an NVIDIA RTX 5080, Intel Core Ultra 9 processor and 32 GB DDR5 RAM. This is a dedicated desktop GPU rather than a laptop with hybrid graphics. Disabling the pet resolves the problem.

Also reproducing on Windows with Codex Desktop package 26.715.4045.0.

In this case the pet was enabled unintentionally because the account menu shifted while trying to click Remaining usage (the UX path discussed in #32069). Once the pet appeared, the computer became noticeably laggy.

This links the performance problem to a frequent account-menu action: a layout-shift misclick can enable an overlay that immediately degrades system responsiveness. Expected behavior is that the pet overlay should not make the computer lag, and users should be able to disable the pet entry persistently.

Additional Windows data point: the pet/avatar overlay can still affect mouse input even after it appears to be disabled/hidden.

Environment:

• Codex Desktop package: 26.715.4045.0
• ChatGPT.exe file version: 150.0.7871.124
• OS: Windows 11 Pro for Workstations, build 26200
• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti, driver 32.0.16.1074, primary display 2560x1440 @ 299 Hz
• Also present: AMD integrated graphics, driver 32.0.21043.19003

Observed behavior:

• The pet was turned off/hidden in the UI and was not visible on screen.
• Codex still caused periodic system-wide mouse freezes / input stutter.
• Enumerating top-level Win32 windows for ChatGPT.exe showed a hidden Electron/Chromium window that looked like the pet overlay:
• title: Codex
• class: Chrome_WidgetWin_1
• size: 408 x 400
• visibility: false
• owned by the main ChatGPT.exe process
• There was no separate pet, avatar, or overlay process; the residual overlay window was inside ChatGPT.exe.

Isolation result:

• Sending WM_CLOSE only to that hidden Codex 408x400 window removed it from the window list.
• ChatGPT.exe / Codex stayed running.
• Mouse stutter stopped immediately after that hidden window was closed.

This suggests the UI toggle may hide the pet/avatar overlay window without destroying it, and the hidden overlay window can still participate in Chromium/GPU/DWM/input handling enough to cause system-wide mouse stalls.

One extra note: this machine also had many MCP/tool child processes at the time, but the stutter stopped after closing only the hidden pet window, without killing the main app or changing MCP configuration. So the hidden overlay window appears to be independently capable of triggering the lag on this setup.