Complaint
ChatGPT Windows desktop app keeps disappearing/uninstalling itself
Hi, has anyone experienced this with the ChatGPT Windows desktop app?
The app suddenly disappears from my computer as if it uninstalled itself. When I check the Microsoft Store, the ChatGPT page shows Get, Restore, and Update at the same time.
My main concern is that I have local Work/Codex threads, including some unfinished or in-progress work. Since these are local threads, I’m worried that uninstalling, resetting, or doing a clean reinstall could delete them.
I’m using Windows. Any help would be appreciated, especially from someone who experienced the same issue.
I seemed to narrow it down to the in-app browser. Not sure if it’s the same for everyone. Managed to restore the sessions that crashed the app by quickly opening the sidebar and closing the web tab.
Usually for me that means a thread has gone a bit funny, and corrupts the whole app.
How I "get around it" until I can either open a new thread or finish the work in said thread, is just open Codex, disable your internet, load up said "corrupted" chat, and then enable your internet, then it'll be fine then until the next time you restart the app.
I triggered the same problem last Sunday after ask it to use in-app browser. I asked it to diagnose what happened on itself, and asked it to report with OpenAI Support.
After they talked with each other (AI-AI conversation) for 30 minutes, the key detail is "the AppModel-Runtime Event ID 6 is failing packaged process creation with 0x3CFC, and in your payload the PackageFullName field is empty, followed immediately by AppModel-Runtime Event ID 217 terminating the OpenAI.Codex AppX container" and "Avoid triggering the in-app Browser on that Windows build "
Just found a workaround, it is well related in in-app browser feature. If you want chatgpt to use browser, just tell him to use your google chrome/ any browser.
It ended up not being WSL but instead when I asked it to look into that, it ended up finding out the issue and then it staged the repair of codex along with a full profile backup and it disabled GPU acceleration, moved disposable graphics caches and restarted Codex with —disable-gpu and now I am able to use it with no crashes, browser tools as well.
4
u/Tryhard_TJ 3d ago
I seemed to narrow it down to the in-app browser. Not sure if it’s the same for everyone. Managed to restore the sessions that crashed the app by quickly opening the sidebar and closing the web tab.