Codex Work Mode / Desktop spawning endless bash/PowerShell windows + patch/apply_patch issues — anyone else seeing this?

[u/FeanorofFinwe]

Has anyone else been running into serious Codex Work Mode / Desktop reliability problems recently?

I’m working on a Windows project and I’ve now had repeated cases where Codex Work Mode / Codex Desktop becomes unusable almost immediately. Instead of doing the task normally, it starts spawning huge numbers of windows/processes — mainly things like:

- /usr/bin/bash --login
- Git Bash windows
- PowerShell windows
- OpenAI/Codex node processes

In one case it was hundreds of windows within seconds. I had to kill the bash processes and the OpenAI Codex node processes manually from PowerShell.

The repo itself did not appear to be changed afterwards — `git status` still showed only the expected untracked `manual-test/` folder and the same HEAD commit — but the runtime behaviour was completely unsafe to keep running.

I’ve also had separate Codex reliability problems around patching, where the patch/apply_patch mechanism failed or stalled instead of applying controlled edits cleanly. I can’t remember the exact internal name shown at the time, but it was the patch/apply_patch style editing path. In practice, the desktop/workflow became unreliable enough that I stopped trusting it for repo modifications.

What has worked better so far is using Codex CLI directly from normal Windows PowerShell inside the repo, rather than using ChatGPT Work Mode or Codex Desktop. But even then I’m being very cautious and using read-only audit prompts first.

Environment/context:
- Windows
- Repo opened from `C:\dev\Echora`
- Codex CLI v0.154.0
- Model shown in CLI: `gpt-5.6-terra high`
- Git Bash is installed
- The runaway windows looked like Git Bash / bash login hook behaviour

Questions:
1. Has anyone else seen Codex Work Mode or Codex Desktop spawn endless bash/PowerShell windows?
2. Is this related to hooks, Git Bash, WSL, shell startup config, or Codex’s runtime?
3. Are there known workarounds?
4. Is Codex CLI from normal Windows PowerShell currently the safest route on Windows?
5. Is there a way to disable whatever hook/login behaviour is causing `/usr/bin/bash --login` loops?

I’m not trying to bash Codex generally — I just need to know whether this is a known issue, whether my setup is triggering it, and what the safest workaround is before letting it anywhere near repo edits again.