“Windows: blank window on startup – no menu bar, UI not rendering (Electron? GPU)”

Support Bug Reports
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1

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

Summary: When launching Cursor and when opening or focusing a project, the editor window often shows no usable UI: gray/black background, sometimes an empty two-pane layout, no menu bar (File, Edit, etc.), no activity bar / Explorer, and no working Command Palette in that state. This is not “an empty project”; the UI fails to render or becomes non-interactive.

Environment: Windows. GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050. Windows Graphics settings were used to assign C:\Users\me\AppData\Local\Programs\cursor\Cursor.exe to High performance (NVIDIA). The issue can occur before relying on that setting.

Expected: Normal IDE after launch or after File → Open Folder (e.g. project folder on Desktop such as jdelie-frontend).

Actual: Frequently a blank “shell” window (only the OS window frame). Sometimes the welcome screen appears, but after selecting/opening the project the UI is blank again or never fully paints. The user understands not to open the repo from internal paths like %USERPROFILE%.cursor\projects or worktrees for daily work; the failure still presents as startup/UI rendering, not missing project files.

Already tried: “disable-hardware-acceleration”: true in %USERPROFILE%.cursor\argv.json, launching with --disable-gpu (and --disable-extensions / other Electron flags as suggested), and Windows GPU preference for Cursor.exe. Issue persists. Renaming Cursor.exe caused “Windows cannot find Cursor.exe”; the executable was restored—renaming is not a viable workaround.

Ask: Please investigate Windows startup / blank-window rendering for this setup (GPU/driver / hybrid graphics if relevant) and advise on log collection when Help → Toggle Developer Tools is unreachable.

Steps to Reproduce

Install Cursor on Windows (default install path, e.g. %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\cursor\Cursor.exe).
(Optional) Set “disable-hardware-acceleration”: true in %USERPROFILE%.cursor\argv.json — issue still occurs.
Launch Cursor from the Start menu or desktop shortcut (double‑click Cursor.exe).
Either wait on the welcome screen or choose File → Open Folder and select a normal project folder on the Desktop (e.g. jaksol-frontend), not a path under %USERPROFILE%.cursor\projects or worktrees.
Observe the main window: it often shows only a dark/gray empty area, sometimes split into two blank panes, without a menu bar (File, Edit, etc.), without the activity bar / Explorer, and the UI is unusable.
(Optional) Launch from Run or a shortcut with Cursor.exe --disable-gpu and/or --disable-extensions — the blank window can still reproduce.

Screenshots / Screen Recordings

Captura de pantalla 2026-04-27 160640.png
Captura de pantalla 2026-04-27 160640.png1324×828 4.4 KB

Operating System

Windows 10/11

Version Information

Cursor IDE : 3.2.11

Does this stop you from using Cursor

Yes - Cursor is unusable

5

Hey, thanks for the detailed report. This is a known class of issues with GPU rendering on Windows, especially on hybrid graphics with NVIDIA. Since --disable-gpu and disable-hardware-acceleration didn’t help, try these in order:

  1. Run with --use-angle=gl as a CLI flag, not via argv.json:
"C:\Users\<you>\AppData\Local\Programs\cursor\Cursor.exe" --use-angle=gl

This switches Chromium to the OpenGL backend. In past threads like Cursor opens, gets stuck, and becomes blank it often helped, but it’s more reliable when passed as a command line argument. If it works, you can add it to the shortcut properties.

  1. Full state reset. Close Cursor, then rename or delete %APPDATA%\Cursor. This keeps your account data, but resets windows and cache. One user in this thread fixed it this way: Cursor windows app completely blank after loading

  2. Update NVIDIA drivers to the latest. GTX 1050 is an older card and it can conflict with the Chromium GPU compositor. If you also have an Intel iGPU, as a quick test use Windows Graphics Settings to set Cursor.exe to Power saving iGPU.

Logs collection, since DevTools is not available:

Cursor.exe --enable-logging --log-file="%USERPROFILE%\cursor-startup.log" --verbose

Reproduce the blank window, then attach the log here.

Also, just in case, try a clean reinstall. Delete %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\cursor and %APPDATA%\Cursor, then download the latest installer from cursor.com/download.

Let me know what worked or didn’t, and if you share the logs we can narrow it down.