Installer fails: venv creation returns exit code 259 on Windows

Subject: Hermes Desktop installer fails: venv creation returns exit code 259 on Windows

Hello,

I'm unable to install Hermes Desktop on Windows. The installer consistently fails during the dependency installation stage with the following error:

setuptools.build_meta.build_editable failed (exit code: 259)

System info:

• Windows 10.0.19045 (64-bit)
• Bundled interpreter: cpython-3.11-windows-x86_64-none (Python 3.11.16)

Troubleshooting already performed (none resolved the issue):

1. Added a Windows Defender exclusion for the full hermes install folder (C:\Users\HP\AppData\Local\hermes) via PowerShell Add-MpPreference -ExclusionPath. Confirmed the exclusion is active via Get-MpPreference.
2. Temporarily disabled Windows Defender real-time protection entirely and retried — same exit code 259.
3. Checked Windows Security for any third-party antivirus — none found, only Windows Defender is active.
4. Checked Protection History in Windows Security — no blocked/quarantined items related to python or hermes.
5. Checked for an Image File Execution Options (IFEO) debugger hook on python.exe in the registry — none found.
6. Deleted the corrupted venv folder and manually recreated it using the bundled interpreter directly: "C:\Users\HP\AppData\Local\hermes\hermes-agent.hermes-runtime\python\cpython-3.11-windows-x86_64-none\python.exe" -m venv venv This produced no error message, but no venv folder was created at all.
7. Isolated the issue further by attempting the exact same venv creation command in a completely unrelated folder (C:\test_venv, no connection to Hermes or AppData). Same result: no folder created, no error shown.
8. Confirmed the bundled interpreter itself runs fine for simple calls: "...\python.exe" --version → correctly prints "Python 3.11.16" But the copy of python.exe inside any venv created from it returns exit code 259 with zero output, even when run directly and interactively from cmd.exe (not just via uv/pip).

Conclusion: this appears to be an issue with the bundled Python distribution itself (cpython-3.11-windows-x86_64-none) failing to produce a working venv on this Windows build, rather than an antivirus, permissions, or environment-specific issue, since it reproduces identically in a completely unrelated folder.

I'm attaching the latest bootstrap-installer.log for reference. Please let me know what additional information would help diagnose this.

Thank you.

bootstrap-installer.log