Skip to content

Sandboxed shell commands fail on Windows with CreateProcessWithLogonW failed: 1326 / 1909 #18620

Description

@TenofHearts

What version of the Codex App are you using (From “About Codex” dialog)?

26.415.40636

What subscription do you have?

Plus

What platform is your computer?

Microsoft Windows NT 10.0.26200.0 x64

What issue are you seeing?

Shell commands fail when run inside the Codex workspace sandbox on Windows. The commands do not appear to reach PowerShell at all. Instead, process creation fails with CreateProcessWithLogonW errors.

Running the same harmless commands outside the sandbox with escalation works correctly, and file edits inside the workspace still work.

What steps can reproduce the bug?

  1. Start a Codex session on Windows with filesystem sandboxing enabled.

  2. Run a harmless sandboxed shell command from the workspace, for example:

    Get-Location
  3. Run another harmless sandboxed command, for example:

    Get-Content -LiteralPath .\sandbox-check.txt

What is the expected behavior?

Sandboxed shell commands should start successfully inside the configured workspace sandbox and execute normally, subject to the workspace-write restrictions.

For example, Get-Location should return the current workspace path.

Additional information

Running the same harmless command outside the sandbox with escalation succeeds:

Get-Location

returns:

C:\Users\ASUS\Documents\Codex\2026-04-20-check-if-the-sandbox-works

A directory listing also succeeds outside the sandbox:

Get-ChildItem -Force

File edits inside the workspace using the patch/edit mechanism also succeed. For example, creating and deleting a temporary file in the workspace worked as expected.

This suggests the workspace path and normal PowerShell execution are valid. The failure appears specific to the Windows sandbox process-launch path.

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    appIssues related to the Codex desktop appbugSomething isn't workingsandboxIssues related to permissions or sandboxingwindows-osIssues related to Codex on Windows systems

    Type

    No type

    Projects

    No projects

    Milestone

    No milestone

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions