Critical: Node.js and bash processes are never released during Next.js development on Windows

Summary

Claude Code spawns numerous Node.js and bash child processes during development (TypeScript compilation, npm install, dev servers, agents) but never cleans them up. Over time this leads to severe memory and CPU exhaustion.

Evidence

Task Manager shows:

• 25+ orphaned "Node.js JavaScript Runtime" processes (ranging from 0.7 MB to 87 MB each)
• 14+ orphaned "bash.exe" processes that persist after commands complete
• Combined impact: 85% CPU, 73% Memory on the machine
• Processes remain even after the tasks that spawned them have finished

Steps to reproduce

1. Open Claude Code on a Next.js project (Windows)
2. Work through a typical development session: npm install, tsc --noEmit, agent spawns, dev server starts
3. Observe Task Manager — Node.js and bash processes accumulate and are never terminated
4. After ~30 minutes of active development, the machine becomes sluggish

Expected behavior

• Child processes should be terminated when their parent task completes
• npm install, tsc --noEmit, and agent subprocesses should not persist after returning results
• Dev servers started via preview_start should be tracked and cleanable
• Session end should kill all spawned processes

Related

This also prevents worktree cleanup — orphaned processes hold file locks on the worktree directory, making git worktree remove fail with "Device or resource busy". See #41740.

Environment

• OS: Windows 11
• Project: Next.js 16 with npm workspaces (monorepo, 4 services)
• Claude Code: latest