Codex Desktop on Windows can leak hundreds of taskkill processes and exhaust WMI
RocStone · ghdev · 2026-07-20
Codex Desktop on Windows can spawn hundreds of lingering taskkill.exe processes and exhaust WMI
An issue against openai/codex reports that normal shell-command use, cancellations, and timeouts can trigger an unbounded cleanup loop on Windows Desktop. Hundreds of taskkill.exe processes remain alive, each with a conhost.exe, and together they hammer Win32Process queries until the Windows Management Instrumentation provider hits its private-memory and thread quotas.
The reporter measured up to 457 taskkill.exe processes, 473 conhost.exe, more than 350,000 handles, and over 14,000 threads. Event Viewer showed WMI quota violations and repeated Win32Process failures; killing the accumulated processes immediately reduced the load, but the leak resumed while Codex kept running.
More from coding & agent
- Team demos AI agent Blender skills with impressive 3D results — noahsolomon · 2026-10-26
- A 13KB Markdown file can hijack Claude Code and Codex via your Downloads folder — pbaylies · 2026-10-26
- A Fallback for an Auto-Posting Bot: Silence Is the Default, Posting Is the Exception — petrusenko_max · 2026-10-26
- Claude Code can now edit videos: a 10-prompt workflow from raw footage to final cut — TawohAwa · 2026-10-26
- Developer Moves All Prompts to Skills: AI Coding Workflow v3 Explained — rseroter · 2026-10-26
- charlie Marsh: rewrites beat external deps in the AI era — mohamedmansour · 2026-10-26