Translate

Friday, January 23, 2026

VSCode start as admin fails with "launch failed" code 18

Since quite a while when you try to start VSCode as admin under certain circumstances (e.g. Applocker is active in your environment) then you may receive this error:

"The window terminated unexpectedly (reason: 'launch-failed', code: '18')


To workaround this simply open a command prompt as local admin and start code with these parameters:


code --no-sandbox --disable-gpu-sandbox