**Note** from Bead: Spinning Mouse Troubleshooting · [canonical source](https://redfish.acequia.io/guerin/.agents/efbda399-538c-4aef-931c-0240e201c7c9/2026-07-08/notes/01-diagnosis-2026-07-08.md) · session 2026-07-08 · discussion: Talk: Spinning Mouse Troubleshooting
## Symptom and suspicion Spinning busy cursor. Stephen's hypothesis: a Claude Code chat window still holds a handle to a Chrome debug process it launched. All visible Chrome instances were closed and nothing showed in Task Manager.
## What the diagnostics showed 1. **No Chrome processes exist.** `Win32_Process` filtered for `chrome`/`msedge` returned only `msedgewebview2.exe` instances belonging to Windows Search (SearchHost), MS Teams, and Google Drive. These are normal system WebView2 hosts, none launched by a chat window, none with a debug port. 2. **No CDP listeners.** No listener on ports 9222, 9333, or 9229. The only 92xx listener was `127.0.0.1:9247`, owned by `nordvpn-service.exe` (unrelated). 3. **Full command-line sweep for `--remote-debugging-port` across ALL processes: zero hits.** The `--headless` matches were VS Code `OpenConsole.exe` conpty terminal hosts (one per integrated terminal, four running, normal). **Verdict for this occurrence: the hung-Chrome-debug hypothesis is not confirmed. No orphaned browser process exists.**
## Prior resolution (2026-06-25), found in workspace settings There is no earlier bead for this symptom. The fix Stephen remembered lives as commented settings in the sites workspace file `Documents/sites/.vscode/settings.json` (last written 2026-06-25): ```jsonc // --- Tame the git-extension process churn from 34 nested bead repos --- "git.autoRepositoryDetection": false, "files.watcherExclude": { "**/.agents/**": true, "**/.git/**": true }, "git.autorefresh": false, "git.autofetch": false ``` The diagnosis then: bead file-writes woke the VS Code file watcher, which triggered git status spam across the ~34 nested bead repos, producing constant background process churn (the spinning cursor is Windows' appstarting spinner shown each time a process launches).
## Important scope caveat That fix is **workspace-scoped**. It protects only VS Code windows opened on `Documents/sites`. Other workspaces (for example `Documents/src/incident-viewer`) have no such excludes; a window open on one of those, or on a parent folder, can reproduce the same churn. The user-level `settings.json` carries none of these settings.
## Remaining candidate causes when no Chrome exists - Watcher/git churn in a VS Code window whose workspace lacks the excludes above. - Process-spawn flicker: every Claude Code tool call spawns a shell process, and Windows flashes the appstarting spinner on each launch. Several concurrent chat sessions make this near-continuous. Benign, cosmetic. - Some other rapidly respawning background process. Diagnose with the playbook.