After launching Cursor, the application opens but becomes unresponsive in the following ways:
.ipynb (Jupyter notebook) tabs fail to load
Integrated terminal does not open
AI agents do not process requests
The issue occurs intermittently — not after every launch. Disabling extensions (–disable-extensions) does not resolve it. Clearing Cache and CachedData folders does not help either.
Steps to Reproduce
Intermittent — no consistent trigger identified yet.
Expected Behavior
Normal startup with all tabs, terminal, and agents functional.
Hey, thanks for the report. This is a known issue. The extension host is not starting properly on some Windows machines after recent updates, which breaks notebooks, terminal, and AI at the same time.
A few things to try:
Clear extension cache. Close Cursor, delete these folders, then restart:
Full profile reset. Close Cursor, rename %APPDATA%\Cursor to Cursor_backup, then launch Cursor. This creates a fresh profile. If it works, reimport your extensions from VS Code.
Disable Python Environment extension. Some users found it conflicts with the Jupyter kernel and causes the hang. Worth trying if you use it.
If nothing helps, you can roll back to an earlier version to unblock your work for now.
Also, if you can grab the red errors from Help > Toggle Developer Tools > Console right after startup, that would help us narrow down why the extension host fails on your setup.
Full profile reset. Quit Cursor, rename ~/Library/Application Support/Cursor to Cursor_backup, then launch it again. You’ll get a clean profile, and you can re-import extensions later from VS Code.
If you’re using the Python Environment extension, try disabling it. It can conflict with the Jupyter kernel.
If that doesn’t help, send:
your Cursor version Cursor > About and your macOS version
your chip Intel or Apple Silicon
the red errors from Help > Toggle Developer Tools > Console right after launch
Mac symptoms can come from a different root bug than the Windows case in this thread, so the Console logs will really help us see what’s going on.
Hey @deanrie , I had a similar issue on macOS and managed to get Cursor to load following your instructions and doing a full profile reset. Doing so caused me to lose all my previous chat history though (still in Cursor_backup). Is there any way to pull it over from the backups?
I’d recommend copying only globalStorage and workspaceStorage, not the whole Cursor_backup/User folder, so you don’t bring back cached extension state that likely caused the original freeze.
Just in case, make a copy of the backup folder before you start. Let me know how it goes.
Hey @deanrie . The issue re-occured again, so I tried this same fix, but pulled over the foldersUser/globalStorageand User/workspaceStorage as you have mentioned. This caused the same loading issue, so I wiped the profile again and added folders one at a time until the bug was reproduced.
It appears one of the folders in User/workspaceStorage is the cause, I am still unable to recover my chats.
Hey, great diagnosis. Narrowing it down to a single folder in workspaceStorage/ really helps. Looks like there’s a corrupted state.vscdb in there, or some extension state got messed up, and the extension host hangs on it during startup.
To restore everything except the broken folder:
Close Cursor.
Delete the problematic subfolder from Cursor_backup/User/workspaceStorage/ or just don’t copy it.
Most data is in globalStorage/state.vscdb. If you’ve already restored it, your chats should show up in history. You’ll only lose the workspace link for that one broken folder, not the threads themselves.
Chat transcripts are also stored separately in ~/.cursor/projects/. That path isn’t touched by a profile reset, so even if something went really wrong with state.vscdb, check there. Your project chats should still be there.
It was usable 10 days ago, but not anymore. GTP and Claude work individually, but these two models in the cursor are unusable, displaying a loading message.