Claude Desktop (Windows) hangs permanently after GPU process crash - no auto-recovery, relaunch blocked

Environment

• Claude Desktop 1.25927.0.0 (MSIX), Windows 11 Pro build 26200
• GPU: NVIDIA GTX 1080 (Pascal, final legacy driver branch 32.0.15.8157 / Oct 2025)

What happens

1. The Chromium GPU process crashes (logged in %APPDATA%\Claude\logs\main.log as GPU process gone: { reason: 'crashed' }). Observed exit codes: 34 (2026-07-28, twice) and 0x60C201E (2026-08-05, three times).
2. After the crash, the app writes nothing further to its logs and the window becomes blank/unresponsive. On 2026-08-05 it stayed in this state for ~7 hours until manually restarted (log is completely silent from 14:20 to 21:30).
3. While the frozen instance is alive, clicking the app icon does not open a new window (presumably the single-instance lock is held by the dead instance), so to the user the app appears "unable to start". Killing all claude.exe processes and relaunching recovers it.

Notes

• In both incidents the crash coincided with a Cloudflare Turnstile challenge being rendered on claude.ai (may or may not be related).
• No OS-level driver reset (no TDR Event 4101), no crashpad dump, no Application Error event — only the Chromium GPU process dies.
• CoworkVMService and package status are healthy (Get-AppxPackage Status = Ok).

Expected behavior

• Electron apps can recover from GPU process death (relaunch the GPU process, fall back to software rendering, or reload the window). Claude Desktop should auto-recover, or at minimum detect the dead renderer and offer a reload, instead of hanging silently and blocking relaunch.
• Alternatively: a documented switch to disable hardware acceleration would help users on older GPUs.

Repro reliability: intermittent (2 incidents in 8 days on this machine).

🤖 Generated with Claude Code