claude-code - 💡(How to fix) Fix [BUG] Desktop sidebars empty until sign-out/sign-in cycle (Windows MSIX, v1.4758.0.0) — likely stale auth state after CLI install/uninstall [1 comments, 2 participants]

What's Wrong?

Both Code and Chat sidebars in Claude Desktop showed completely empty for ~2 days despite:

• Local session files present on disk (62 sessions in claude-code-sessions/)
• Main process successfully loading them (main.log: Loaded 62 persisted sessions)
• Same account working correctly on claude.ai in browser
• No 401/403 errors anywhere — auth appeared valid
• Analytics, model picker, and account lookup all working fine

Resolution that worked: Sign out of Desktop, sign back in. Both sidebars repopulated immediately on next launch.

Likely root cause: Stale auth/token state. The token continued authenticating successfully for most queries (analytics, account info, model configs) but the specific data path feeding the sidebars returned empty without erroring. Sign-out/sign-in invalidated and rebuilt the auth state cleanly.

Suspected trigger: Side-by-side install of @anthropic-ai/claude-code standalone CLI (~Apr 22-23), which shares ~/.claude/.credentials.json with Desktop. CLI was uninstalled shortly after due to known Desktop-launch conflict, but the credential state appears to have remained subtly poisoned for Desktop until a fresh sign-in.

Why this matters as a bug report: The failure mode is silent. No errors, no warnings, no banner. Sidebar just renders empty. Users have no way to know "sign out and back in" is the fix — at least 5 open/duplicate issues describe this same symptom (#50856, #43674, #47522, #22723, #48495) and none of them mention sign-in/sign-out as a resolution. This is a discoverability problem on top of a state-management bug.

Steps to Reproduce (likely)

1. Have Claude Desktop installed and signed in, working normally
2. Install standalone @anthropic-ai/claude-code CLI
3. Use or uninstall the CLI (either may trigger the credential state change)
4. Restart Desktop — sidebars now empty despite local sessions existing
5. No error appears. App looks healthy, just no sidebar content.

Expected Behavior

Either (a) Desktop detects stale auth and prompts for re-sign-in, (b) the sidebar query handles the stale-but-non-erroring state gracefully, or (c) at minimum a "Could not load sessions — try signing out and back in" banner appears.

Environment

• Claude Desktop 1.4758.0.0 (Windows MSIX, Claude_pzs8sxrjxfjjc)
• Windows 11
• Auth: OAuth (claude.ai account)
• CLI history: @anthropic-ai/claude-code installed and uninstalled ~Apr 22-23

Additional Findings (Separate But Worth Noting)

claude.ai-web.log contains repeated errors with ANSI escape codes leaking into URL paths:

endpoint: /api/organizations/<org-id>/model_configs/claude-opus-4-7[1m]

The [1m] is an ANSI bold-on escape sequence being interpolated into the model ID. Returns 404, fires in tight loops. Same pattern appeared earlier with claude-opus-4-6[1m]. This is a separate renderer bug — not the cause of the empty sidebar — but suggests there's a logger/format-string hygiene issue in URL construction somewhere.

Related Issues

#50856, #43674, #47522, #22723, #48495 — same/similar empty-sidebar symptoms, all unresolved or closed-as-duplicate