Cursor WSL integration is broken

[adam3141 (Adam Hamilton)]

Describe the Bug

This is, at least 2 weeks in a row that I have been unable to start cursor in WSL. This problem just appeared out of the blue.

Everytime I start I get an error that I am unable to start cursor and that I should shutdown WSL and retry. There are messages such as

• your 131072x1 screen size is bogus. expect trouble
• Failed to connect to Cursor server from Windows, attempt 3 of 3 request to http://127.0.0.1:46073/version failed, reason: connect ETIMEDOUT 127.0.0.1:46073

I have shutdown WSL. I have reinstalled WSL. I have uninstalled Cursor and installed 1.2. I have tried installing older versions of the Remote WSL extension. I have even removed the cursor directory from my Roaming profile.

None of which has done any good.

Is there something that is preventing the cursor server to communicate?

For reference, Visual Studio Code has no issue with connecting to WSL

Steps to Reproduce

I don’t know. This surfaced a couple of weeks ago and I have not been able to get it working again - enough to reproduce the error

Screenshots / Screen Recordings

Operating System

Windows 10/11

Current Cursor Version (Menu → About Cursor → Copy)

Version: 1.3.9 (user setup)
VSCode Version: 1.99.3
Commit: 54c27320fab08c9f5dd5873f07fca101f7a3e070
Date: 2025-08-01T20:19:30.453Z
Electron: 34.5.1
Chromium: 132.0.6834.210
Node.js: 20.19.0
V8: 13.2.152.41-electron.0
OS: Windows_NT x64 10.0.26100

Does this stop you from using Cursor

Yes - Cursor is unusable

[adam3141 (Adam Hamilton)]

I just want to add that I may have solved this by removing the line networkingMode=mirrored in my .wslconfig

After removing that, it seemed to work again without issue.

However, I still believe this is a bug because this doesn’t happen with Visual Studio Code so I don’t know what the difference is.

To have to do this is quite annoying as I need the mirrored mode for some other things to work in WSL.