Linking this to my earlier report on the terminal popup issue: Terminals Popping Up After Update
That one got fixed in v1.19.6 (shell fallback was spawning visible cmd.exe windows for MCP init). While profiling this new issue I noticed the underlying problem goes deeper — the MCP subsystem doesn’t just have a shell pathing issue, it fundamentally lacks lifecycle management. Processes aren’t cleaned up on workspace close, config changes don’t propagate to running instances, and the per-workspace isolation means process count scales multiplicatively instead of linearly.
Both issues live in the same area of the codebase — figured it’s worth connecting the dots for the team.