Windows Store Codex 26.721.3996.0 crashes after creating a new task (process is not defined in AppRoutes)

Resolved 💬 2 comments Opened Jul 24, 2026 by DreamWaglan Closed Jul 24, 2026

💡 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)?

26.721.3996.0

What subscription do you have?

ChatGPT Pro

What platform is your computer?

Microsoft Windows NT 10.0.26200.0 x64

What issue are you seeing?

After creating a new task in the Windows Store version of Codex, the application became permanently unusable.

Every subsequent launch immediately displays the "Something went wrong" page.

The application never returns to the home screen.

I have already tried:

Repair
Reset
Reinstall
Deleting LocalCache
Deleting the Chromium profile
Deleting Preferences
Deleting Session Storage

None of them changed the behavior.

The desktop log consistently reports:

Error: process is not defined
name=AppRoutes

The app-server starts successfully.

Authentication succeeds.

thread/list succeeds.

conversationId=null

No backend task loading errors (404/500) appear in the log.

The crash happens during AppRoutes rendering instead of loading a specific task.

What steps can reproduce the bug?

Launch Codex Desktop.
Create a new task.
The task creation fails.
Close Codex.
Launch Codex again.

Result:

Every launch immediately shows the "Something went wrong" page.
The application becomes unusable.

What is the expected behavior?

If creating a task fails, Codex should recover gracefully and return to the home screen instead of permanently entering the error page.

codex-desktop-8872f8f0-4f4b-4954-8851-40512e42508a-14868-t0-i1-061615-0.log

Additional information

This issue is reproducible 100% after the first failed task creation.

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.

#35061
#35073

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terentyevi-alt · 1 month ago

Independent confirmation on Windows with the same Microsoft Store build.

Environment

Package: OpenAI.Codex_26.721.3996.0_x64__2p2nqsd0c76g0
Codex app-server: 0.146.0-alpha.3.1
Renderer bundle: app-initial-DVfVy4b5.js

Observed behavior

The full-page error boundary occurs on every launch. It reproduced in three separate launch logs. In all cases:

the bundled codex.exe spawned successfully;
the initialize handshake succeeded;
authentication and account lookup succeeded;
the main window finished loading;
the renderer then failed in AppRoutes with:

error [electron-message-handler] error boundary
errorMessage="process is not defined"
errorName=Error
name=AppRoutes

There was no native application crash and no corresponding Application Error / WER event. The agent/app-server continued running, which isolates the failure to the Electron renderer.

Additional state evidence

The persisted desktop state contains three local projects:

two projects with one rootPaths entry;
one project with two rootPaths entries.

The currently selected project has only one root, but the app still crashes at startup while the unselected multi-root project exists. This may expand the trigger described in #35061: AppRoutes may iterate or compare roots for every persisted project, not only the selected project.

The Update ChatGPT and Try again buttons do not recover the UI. No updater/check result is written to the desktop logs; they only lead back to the same error boundary.

This does not appear related to authentication, networking, WebView2, the Codex backend, or repository integrity. It is consistent with the renderer reaching a browser path implementation that expects process.cwd() while the sandboxed renderer does not expose the Node process global.

I have intentionally omitted account identifiers, project paths, thread IDs, and full logs. I can provide a narrowly redacted log excerpt if maintainers need it.