Being on Windows, browsing an extension and adding it to Goose Desktop is fine. After adding it you can see that the parts of the command are getting escaped with a backslash. (npx -y \@upstash/context7-mcp)

After adding the extension and creating a new chat you can see that it fails with the following message: process quit before initialization: stderr =

On Linux this works fine as expected because the backslash is no problem in a Linux shell. Windows on the other hand fails to start the MCP. You can view the same behaviour when running the escaped command directly.

Error running manually with an escaped @ sign:

PS C:\Users\joshu> npx -y \@upstash/context7-mcp
npm error code ENOENT
npm error syscall open
npm error path C:\@upstash\context7-mcp\package.json
npm error errno -4058
npm error enoent Could not read package.json: Error: ENOENT: no such file or directory, open 'C:\@upstash\context7-mcp\package.json'
npm error enoent This is related to npm not being able to find a file.
npm error enoent
npm error A complete log of this run can be found in: C:\Users\joshu\scoop\persist\nodejs-lts\cache\_logs\2026-01-29T16_29_20_751Z-debug-0.log

Starting without:

PS C:\Users\joshu> npx -y @upstash/context7-mcp
WARNING: Using default CLIENT_IP_ENCRYPTION_KEY.
Context7 Documentation MCP Server v2.1.1 running on stdio

diagnostics zip

diagnostics_20260129_2.zip

Expected behavior

No error message and a starting MCP.

Screenshots

• OS & Arch: Windows 11 Home 25H2
• Interface: Goose Desktop
• Version: 1.21.2
• Extensions enabled: Context7, Developer, Extension Manager, Skills, Todo
• Provider & Model: Ollama - qwen2.5:7b (happens with non-ollama models too)

Additional context

I installed Goose Desktop using the Scoop package manager.
I'm by no means a Windows expert, but I believe it's because of the escaping of special characters.