2,689 stale session files and a 1.8 GB Hyper-V VM that fires up unconditionally — that's what Anthropic's Claude Desktop forces on Windows users, even when they only want a plain chat session.
David Ellett posted a detailed bug report to the claude-code repository, and the numbers are damning. On a 16 GB Razer Blade running Windows 11 Pro 25H2, the app triggers the Hyper-V Host Compute Service at boot, spawning a vmwp.exe process that consumes 1,796–1,846 MB of RAM. That's 11% of total system memory before the user has typed a single prompt.
1.8 GB VM Spawned Without Consent
The VM appears as "Vmmem" in Task Manager and starts even when the user has no intention of using Cowork or agent mode. Ellett confirmed via PowerShell diagnostics that WSL, Hyper-V management tools, Docker, and Windows Sandbox are all disabled. The only enabled virtualization feature is VirtualMachinePlatform. The vmcompute service is set to Manual but gets triggered at boot by an RPC interface event (GUID: bc90d167-9470-4139-a9ba-be0bbbf5b74d) from services.exe. Not a user-initiated action.
The event log is littered with errors: "The specified property query is invalid: The virtual machine or container JSON document is invalid." These have been recurring since at least February 19, 2026.
Root Cause: 2,689 Stale Session Files and an Unconditional Trigger
Digging into %APPDATA%\Claude\local-agent-mode-sessions, Ellett found 2,689 session files from previous Cowork sessions — Docker-style names like "nifty-dreamy-volta" and "admiring-elegant-johnson". Even after deleting all 2,689 files and killing the VM processes, reopening Claude Desktop immediately respawned the 1.8 GB VM. The app doesn't check whether VM infrastructure is needed; it just fires it up on every launch.
Impact on 16 GB Laptops
On a 16 GB system, memory usage jumps from ~50% to ~62% at idle before the user does anything. Normal application load pushes that to 70–75%, causing system sluggishness. The only reliable workaround is to disable VirtualMachinePlatform entirely — which breaks Cowork functionality — or manually kill vmwp.exe and vmcompute.exe after every launch.
What Anthropic Should Fix
The bug report asks for three changes: VM infrastructure should initialize on demand for Cowork/agent mode only, stale session files should be cleaned up automatically, and the app should gracefully fall back to chat-only mode when VM initialization isn't needed. Those are reasonable engineering expectations, not feature requests.
With 132k stars on the claude-code repository and 21.3k forks, this bug affects a significant chunk of Anthropic's user base. Fixing it would reclaim over a gigabyte of memory on millions of Windows laptops.
Source: Claude Desktop spins up a VM without no way of stopping it
Domain: github.com
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