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Codex Issues / #40855

Blank screen when config.toml contains duplicate personality key

Open 💬 1 comment Opened Aug 26, 2026 by persistInHacker

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

26.820.7780.0

What subscription do you have?

ChatGPT Plus

What platform is your computer?

Windows 11 x64

What issue are you seeing?

The Codex/ChatGPT Windows app opens to a completely blank window when configuration loading fails because of a duplicate key.

The log contains:

Failed to load config requirements
errorMessage="failed to read configuration layers: ..."

The app should display the configuration error instead of showing a blank screen.

What steps can reproduce the bug?

  1. Define personality more than once in the Codex configuration layers, for example:
personality = "pragmatic"
  1. Launch the Codex/ChatGPT Windows app.
  2. The app opens with a blank screen.
  3. Remove the duplicate key and launch the app again.
  4. The app starts normally.

What is the expected behavior?

_No response_

Additional information

_No response_

View original on GitHub ↗

1 Comment

Kazah1242 · 1 day ago

I encountered the same issue on Windows with ChatGPT/Codex desktop app version 26.820.7780.0.

Observed behavior:

  1. The splash/logo rendered normally.
  2. The sign-in screen rendered normally and authentication succeeded.
  3. Immediately after authentication, the app displayed a completely gray/blank window and remained in that state.

The browser version of ChatGPT and Microsoft Edge continued to work normally. The desktop app processes also remained alive, including the renderer, GPU, network, and storage-related processes; there was no obvious application crash.

Troubleshooting that did not resolve the issue included:

  • Reinstalling the Windows app
  • Windows App Repair / Reset
  • Clearing the app package cache/state and Chromium profile
  • Checking/repairing WebView2
  • Disabling GPU rendering
  • Launching with --disable-direct-composition
  • Checking network-related causes and Windows logs

The issue was resolved immediately after temporarily renaming:

%USERPROFILE%\.codex\config.toml

to:

%USERPROFILE%\.codex\config.toml.disabled

After that change, the app launched and worked normally. This strongly suggests that a configuration-loading failure can leave the Windows UI on a blank/gray screen instead of displaying a readable configuration error.