Settings window opens by itself after an update relaunch and covers the app

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John Lauer · 4d ago

Hydrogen 1.0.652 (Windows), 2026-10-19 ~05:20Z. After the update relaunch, a Settings window ("Settings - Hydrogen", 1786x1511) opened by itself on top of the maximized Hydrogen window and stayed there until it was closed by hand about 40 minutes later. Nobody was at the PC; around the same time a "Parts Search" webview tab was restored.

Effect: a full-screen recording of the workspace captured a static Settings window instead of the AI working (no new frames for ~35 minutes), and screenshots of the main window were misleading.

Expected: never open Settings unprompted. If something (a dock launch failure?) needs the user, show a toast or the bell. Log the reason Settings opened. Related: an earlier report in this tracker of Settings popping up when a Parts Search dock launch failed on its port.

1 Reply

John Lauer · 3d ago

Looked into this. Hydrogen itself has no automatic path that opens Settings: every opener is a click (Adom menu, the recovery shield, the Dock Bar gear, the project nav) or the control API's settings.open UI action, which AI tools and our Ralph test sweep use. The relaunch at 05:18Z was the release test installing 1.0.652 on that PC (see #124; that no longer happens, and /updater/install now refuses while work is running), so the most likely source is an automated settings.open around that relaunch, but the log did not say who, so I can't prove it.

So the log will now: every open writes [settings] Settings window opened via <source> (section ...), where the source is the click that opened it or control API: /ui/invoke settings.open. Ships in the next build. If it happens again, the line names the caller; reply here with the time and I'll trace it. Leaving this open until then.