Update-triggered restart hangs, forces full PC reboot, and recent sessions disappear from sidebar

Bug report: Update-triggered restart hangs, forces full PC reboot, and recent sessions disappear from sidebar

Environment

• OS: Windows 11 Pro (10.0.26200)
• App: Claude desktop app (Windows Store / MSIX package, AppUserModelId Claude_pzs8sxrjxfjjc!Claude)
• Claude Code version seen in session metadata: 2.1.205
• Recurring: this has happened multiple times over the past week (evidence in local session logs from 2026-07-23, 2026-07-24, 2026-07-25)

Steps to reproduce

1. Get notified of an available update inside the Claude desktop app.
2. Click the update button.
3. App attempts to restart itself to apply the update.

Actual behavior

• The app fails to restart. It reports being "in use" (사용중) and will not restart.
• The app cannot be force-closed through any in-app means.
• Killing the process via Task Manager and relaunching also does not resolve it (only a full PC restart clears the hung state).
• After the forced PC restart, the "최근 항목" (Recent Items / session list) sidebar in the app is missing several sessions that existed before the crash (observed 3 missing sessions in the most recent occurrence).
• The underlying session transcript data is NOT actually deleted — the raw .jsonl transcript files are still present on disk under %USERPROFILE%\.claude\projects\<project-slug>\<session-id>.jsonl with correct, complete content. Only the app's own "recent sessions" index/sidebar fails to reference them after the crash+reboot.
• There appears to be no in-app way to reopen/resume a specific past session by ID when it's missing from the sidebar. Switching the app's working directory (via the "디렉터리 변경" / change-directory option) and using the in-app search do not surface the missing sessions either.
• The CLI claude --resume <session-id> command works to recover the content, but is not usable from inside the desktop app itself (users who only use the desktop app, not a terminal, have no recovery path).

Expected behavior

• Update should restart the app cleanly without hanging, without requiring a full OS reboot.
• Even if a restart is forced, the session list index should be rebuilt from the on-disk transcript files on next launch so no sessions are lost from the UI.
• The desktop app should offer some way to browse/reopen any locally-stored session (e.g. by searching full transcript content, or listing all .jsonl files found for known project directories), not just a possibly-stale recent-items cache.

Additional notes

This is a repeat occurrence — the user had already written a local Task Manager kill+relaunch script (claude_unstick.bat/.ps1) after a prior instance of this same hang, specifically to avoid needing a full PC reboot. Even using that script, some update-triggered hangs still are not recoverable without a full reboot, which is when the session-list corruption occurs.