Codex Windows App – UI closes but background processes remain, blocking relaunch

Codex
1

I’ve run into a consistent issue with the Codex desktop app on Windows that looks like a process lifecycle bug.

Behavior:

  • I close the Codex UI window normally.
  • The application appears to exit.
  • However, one or more background processes remain running.
  • Attempting to reopen Codex does nothing — presumably because it detects an already running instance.
  • The only way to recover is to manually kill the leftover processes in Task Manager.

Notes:

  • This happens consistently, not sporadically.
  • Feels like either:
    • The app is not properly shutting down its process tree, or
    • The single-instance guard is too strict and doesn’t recover from orphaned processes.
  • If this is intentional (e.g., tray/minimized behavior), it’s not clear to the user and there’s no visible way to properly “quit” the app.

This isn’t a blocker, but it’s disruptive enough to break normal workflow.

2

Thanks for reporting.

You are more than welcome to report issues here.

The official place to report such issues is the OpenAI GitHub Codex issues tab.

I asked ChatGPT to find the closest issue and reported

If this issue algins with your issue then give the issue a thumbs up vote to show this is important.

If this issues does not align with your issue you can search for others and/or create a new issue.

3

Thanks. I didn’t know where to report it.
Codex didn’t know either.

4

I’d actually recommend upvoting this one instead / also:

Reason being that the other one has multiple issues that may not be connected – poorly written and therefore likely to be ignored.