Windows: Desktop app sidebar/session list emptied after forced reinstall, though CLI (--resume) still shows all prior sessions intact

Confirming this same bug on my end — Windows 11 Pro 10.0.26200, Claude Code CLI 2.1.221, Claude Desktop, after a full reinstall.

Same symptoms:

• Sidebar empty for all ~10 custom project folders except the one session created post-reinstall
• Transcripts confirmed fully intact under ~/.claude/projects/<project-key>/*.jsonl
• claude --resume / claude -r <session-id> from the correct project directory successfully lists and resumes every prior session

Possibly useful extra data point: my main.log shows this at the very first line of the very first startup after reinstall, before anything else initializes:

2026-08-04 20:23:17 [error] Error reading or parsing config file (SyntaxError)

By the time I checked afterward, every config file I could find (settings.json, %APPDATA%\Claude\config.json, claude_desktop_config.json, ~/.claude.json) parsed as valid JSON — consistent with the app hitting a corrupt config on that first launch and silently regenerating a fresh/empty one, which would also explain why the session index (%APPDATA%\Claude\claude-code-sessions\) came back empty instead of raising a visible error.

Might be worth having the app surface that JSON parse error to the user instead of silently resetting state, and/or having it rebuild the session index from ~/.claude/projects/ on startup rather than depending solely on a separate index cache.

Confirming a second recurrence on the same Windows PC where I originally reported this (2026-08-04 → recurred 2026-08-05).

Sequence: Desktop app crashed again → uninstalled via Windows Settings → PC restart → reinstalled. After reinstall, GUI sidebar again shows only the single new session, all prior project folders/sessions empty.

• ~/.claude/projects/<project-key>/*.jsonl again fully intact (94 files for the affected project this time).
• claude --resume (CLI, bundled/reported version 2.1.200) again lists and resumes all prior sessions correctly.
• Unlike @eruwu03's report above, my main.log for this reinstall (GUI/CCD 2.1.221) has a clean startup — no Error reading or parsing config file (SyntaxError) at the top. So the config-corruption theory may not be the only trigger.
• What I did find in main.log this time:

``
[LocalSessionManager] Session storage directory does not exist yet, skipping load:
C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming\Claude\claude-code-sessions\<accountId>\<orgId>
`
i.e. the GUI's own session index cache under claude-code-sessions/ is simply missing/empty post-reinstall, separate from the real transcript data under ~/.claude/projects/. This is consistent with the session index not being rebuilt from ~/.claude/projects/` on first launch after a reinstall, regardless of whether a config parse error also occurred.

Would still support the suggestion above to rebuild the session index from ~/.claude/projects/ on startup when the index cache is empty, rather than treating an empty index as "no prior sessions."

Same issue here on Windows 11. After a forced reinstall of the desktop app, the sidebar/session list showed 0 previous sessions for a project, even though the underlying transcripts (.jsonl) under %USERPROFILE%\.claude\projects\<project-hash>\ were still fully intact on disk.

In my case it went a step further: the project registry in .claude.json also lost an entry — one of my 4 registered projects was missing entirely after the reinstall, and I had to manually re-add it to .claude.json to get it to show up as a project option again (even then, it only appeared as a brand-new empty session, not linked to the old transcript history).

This lines up with the theory already discussed here: the GUI's own session index/project registry is separate from the real data under ~/.claude/projects/, and isn't being rebuilt from it on first launch after a reinstall.

The transcripts are still there, so this looks like the Desktop session index being reset by the reinstall, not the conversation history being deleted. claude --resume is reading the JSONL layer under ~/.claude/projects/; Desktop needs matching metadata files with cliSessionId values to render those sessions in its session list.

I built BasedGPT/claude-code-session-recovery for this missing-index case. Run python tools/diagnose.py first and follow the exact command it prints. If it reports orphaned transcript files, the guarded path is a dry run of synth_session_metadata.py; review the proposed entries, quit Desktop fully, then apply the printed command. If this is an MSIX install, the public toolkit documents that externally written metadata may not surface reliably there, so treat the diagnosis as confirmation and use the standalone Win32 install before attempting a metadata write.

That separates a missing Desktop index from a missing transcript, and avoids treating the CLI's working --resume list as proof that Desktop will rebuild itself.

Hope this helps, if my tools are able to help you, would appreciate a ⭐ :)