One of Microsoft's biggest rivals has been struggling to make a bug-free Windows 11/10 app

Anthropic's Claude desktop apps on Windows 11 and 10 have been having all sorts of problems.

Microsoft released the latest update for Windows 11 25H2 and 24H2 yesterday under KB5083769 with major changes related to remote desktop, among other things. The latest version of Windows 11 is packed with AI features, which makes the new downloads really big (you can significantly reduce that size using reputable unofficial tools). Microsoft bakes them into Windows 11 under Copilot branding, though currently it is busy removing it from its apps.

One such use case is GitHub Copilot, which also bundles in third-party models like Anthropic's Claude Sonnet. And users also have the option to use dedicated desktop apps. If you have been using Claude's desktop apps on Windows 11 or 10, you must have noticed various issues.

While Anthropic is not a Microsoft rival in the general OS or browser space, in the field of AI, which matters the most to tech companies now, it is undoubtedly one of its biggest ones.

There have been confirmed issues with users reporting installation failures on Windows wherein the app would redirect them to the Microsoft Store. The funny thing is that there was no Claude Desktop app for Windows available on the Store at all. The Cowork feature would also lead to launch fails or crashes on Windows 11 Home systems due to the lack of Hyper-V virtualization.

Aside from that, even if the installation is carried out successfully, the Claude Desktop app could fail to open and run properly, as it would crash and require a reboot each time. Mishandling of OAuth flow has also brought up issues as users report that the main app itself does not work properly as a result. Apparently, users may need to enable Developer Mode on Windows to allow sideloading of the app.

Meanwhile, on Windows 10, a user discovered that a bug in Claude's app now causes Task Manager, one of the most useful utilities, to crash.

Although most of these issues were closed or remain open for investigation, recently, a Reddit user highlighted how Anthropic closed several "critical" issues as "not planned" noting that the majority of the IT enterprise world still runs on Windows, which makes it unacceptable to them. The bugs they emphasize are mainly related to Claude Code's VS Code extension on Windows WSL (Window Subsystem for Linux). The user notes:

• The VS Code extension freezes on ANY file write or code generation over 600 lines. Just shows "Not responding" and dies. Filed as #23053 on GitHub — Anthropic closed it as "not planned" and locked it.
• The March 2026 Windows update (KB5079473) crashes every WSL2 session at 4.6GB heap exhaustion.
• Claude Code spawns PowerShell 38 times on every WSL startup — 30 seconds of input lag before you can even type.
• Memory leaks grow to 21GB+ during normal sessions with sub-agents.
• Path confusion between WSL and Windows causes silent failures.
• Extreme CPU/memory usage makes extended sessions on WSL2 impossible.

The post has been heavily upvoted on the ClaudeAI subreddit indicating that many users have agreed with it. To be fair to Anthropic, it makes sense why the company closed these bugs as "not planned" considering Claude for Linux probably wasn't tested on Windows 11 under WSL conditions.

However, the issue at large remains, as it seems there have been many quality control problems on Claude for Windows, or just in general, as recently, Claude was found eating up daily usage limits rather fast. The problem was occurring on Claude's Max plan, and the bug still remains open.

Source: GitHub (link1, link2, link3, link4, link5)

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Posted Thursday 16 April 2026 at 9:30 am AEST (my time).

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