Agent chaosAs reported·2 Nov 2026
A user says 20,000+ leftover Codex temp folders left their Windows account stuck at the Welcome screen
As reported One person’s public account. We couldn’t independently confirm it, and we’ll update this if the facts change.
A Windows user says more than 20,000 empty temp folders left behind by the Codex desktop app stopped their main account from logging in, even in Safe Mode, until they moved the folder aside from Windows' recovery mode.
This is one person's account on GitHub, not independently confirmed. It was filed against OpenAI's Codex app on 1 November 2026, on Windows 10 Pro with Codex app version 26.1027.3384.0. A bot flagged an earlier report of the same temp-folder leak; the user replied that theirs went much further than the leak itself.
What happened
More than 20,000 folders named like .tmpXXXXXX built up in the user's Windows Temp folder. Then their main account stopped logging in. Windows reached the Welcome screen and stayed there. Rebooting didn't help, and neither did Safe Mode.
The user preserved the old Temp folder and counted what was in it: 36,506 top-level folders, 31,918 of them empty, and 20,271 matching the .tmpXXXXXX pattern. Of those, 20,231 were empty. They opened all 40 that weren't, and 38 held the files of the Node runtime bundled with Codex. They say other apps also had data in Temp, so they only blame the .tmpXXXXXX folders on Codex.
During the failed logins, Windows kept logging a warning that the user-profile step of logging on was "taking long time". The profile itself still loaded as a normal one, they say.
How they got back in
Normal recovery didn't work. Ctrl+Alt+Delete didn't respond at the stuck Welcome screen. A second account could reach the desktop, but admin prompts accepted the password and then never opened the program. The keyboard didn't respond on the Startup Settings menu.
In the end they used an admin command prompt in Windows' recovery environment to move the Temp folder aside and create a fresh, empty one. After a reboot the same account logged in straight away, with the same profile and the same apps.
Within minutes of recovering, they say, Codex started creating new empty temp folders again.
Our take
This is our opinion. Nothing was deleted here, but the user was locked out of their own computer, and on a machine with only one account there'd be no clue that the coding agent or the Temp folder was to blame. Clean-up is part of the job: an agent tool that creates scratch folders should remove them, and if you run one on Windows, keep an eye on how big your Temp folder is getting.
Agent tools leave scratch files behind: check that yours cleans up, and watch your Temp folder before it grows into an outage.
