"Unable to resolve your shell environment in a reasonable time. Please review your shell configuration and restart."

[conioh]

Does this issue occur when all extensions are disabled?: Yes

Version: 1.101.2 (user setup)
Commit: 2901c5a
Date: 2025-06-24T20:27:15.391Z
Electron: 35.5.1
ElectronBuildId: 11727614
Chromium: 134.0.6998.205
Node.js: 22.15.1
V8: 13.4.114.21-electron.0
OS: Windows_NT x64 10.0.22631

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Launch VSCode.
2. Wait a few seconds.
3. Get the following message:

Unable to resolve your shell environment in a reasonable time. Please review your shell configuration and restart.

1. I've tried to modify the timeout to the maximum - 120s - and I still get it. I do have a heavy profile that takes 2s-8s to load, according what pwsh reports, but not 120. I don't know why the pwsh you're launching get stuck for 120, but I don't really care and it doesn't really matter because:
2. I'm not interested in "reviewing" and modifying my pwsh profile just for VSCodes' sake, as the documentation says I should.
   There's no reason I should modify my entire profile just because VSCode does something really weird.
3. The original reason I could find for this "feature" is basically "some users have one setting for certain environment variables (e.g. TMPDIR) and override that value in their .xyzshrc file, and that breaks all kinds of stuff under certain circumstances". Nice problem, not nice solution. It's so intrusive and causes so many problems that it should really have given pauses to whoever was responsible for that. But regardless of that:
4. Even if that's the solution that was decided upon, for good reasons or bad or even no reasons at all, there should be a configuration to stop it. Not a command-line argument. Just give me a configuration (that syncs across devices using settings sync) that says "don't ever do that whole "resolve shell environment thing", I want none of that."
   I think it's both easier and more useful than trying to understand why VSCode waits 120s for something that usually takes about 3s on a specific configuration.

[omeroguz45]

I have the same issue. Both on powershell and zsh on WSL, with customized and fresh shell configurations the issue persists. Set the timeout to 120, same issue. The issue only occurs when you run vscode outside your initialized shell (i.e. the main exe in cmd, also with the wsl connection flag). The issue occurs with and without extensions (tested with disabling then uninstalling). No issues when running code from inside both shells. I've tried a clean install but the issue still persists.

Only relevant log from the output main tab I get is [error] resolving shell environment failed Unable to resolve your shell environment in a reasonable time. Please review your shell configuration and restart.

Same vscode version as OP. Windows ver: 24H2 Build 26100.4351

[conioh]

Okay. Found the offending PR #249301 and commit (cbb88a3). It was obviously pointless in the first place, but you know how it's like...

Luckily it caused so much problems that people have already complained (#251446) and a fix was merged (#252703). Now we just have to wait for the next release.

I guess we can close this because the immediate problem is fixed, but you may still want to consider a configuration for this "feature".

[Tyriar]

My message on #249301 (comment):

@conioh sorry about the hassle, I see you've seen we reverted it #252431 (comment). Unfortunately it's a little too late in the month to do a recovery release but if we root caused it earlier we would have.

I wouldn't even want a config for this, it should instead be explicit support for picking up fnm in the extensions.