RunContainer

Overview

A managed home for your Windows applications

Normally, installing a Windows application spreads its files, settings and shortcuts across your PC. RunContainer is designed to give applications a managed environment of their own, so they are easier to keep track of, keep apart and clean up.

Ordinary installation

The application is installed directly onto your system.
Its files and settings mix with everything else on the PC.
Removing it relies on the application’s own uninstaller.

With RunContainer

The application is installed inside an environment RunContainer manages.
Environments are designed to be kept separate from your everyday desktop and from other environments.
You manage, run and clean up applications from one place.

How RunContainer differs from ordinary installation →

How it works

Four steps, from install to clean-up

The workflow is the same whatever the application.

Create an environment
Set up a managed space for an application or a group of related applications.
Install the application
Run the application’s installer inside that environment instead of directly on your PC.
Run it from RunContainer
Launch and stop the application from RunContainer, which keeps track of where it belongs.
Keep or clean up
Keep the environment for everyday use, or reset or remove it when you no longer need it.

Getting started

New to RunContainer?

The documentation takes you from the core ideas to a first walkthrough.

Read what RunContainer is and the key terms.
Check the prerequisites and the Downloads page.
Follow the beginner walkthrough.

Responsible use

Isolation helps. It is not a guarantee.

Reduces impact

Environments are intended to limit how much an application affects the rest of your PC.

Not malware protection

RunContainer is not an antivirus or a security sandbox for hostile software. Keep your normal protections on.

Mind your credentials

Applications inside an environment can still see what you type into them. Sign in only where you trust the software.

Read the safety and privacy guide →

FAQ

Common questions

Is RunContainer like LiveContainer, but for Windows?

The idea is similar. LiveContainer lets iOS apps run inside its own managed space instead of being installed on the device directly. RunContainer applies the same idea to Windows: applications are installed and run inside environments that RunContainer manages, rather than as ordinary standalone desktop applications.

Does RunContainer make untrusted software safe to run?

No. Isolation is intended to reduce the impact an application has on the rest of your system, but it is not a guarantee. Treat unknown software with the same caution you would anywhere else.

Will every Windows application work?

No. Some applications expect to be installed system-wide, rely on drivers or services, or use protection that does not work in a managed environment. Compatibility varies from application to application.

Where can I download it?

Yes, it is available now. RunContainer 0.8.0 is the current Stable release for Windows. The Downloads page points at the installer attached to that Stable GitHub release; both are the same file, and the page lists its SHA-256 checksum so you can verify the download. Release installers are not code-signed yet, so Windows shows “Unknown publisher” and SmartScreen may warn before the installer runs. A very new version can still prompt even once signing is in place, because SmartScreen reputation is built from clean downloads over time.

All frequently asked questions →

Changelog

Release highlights

0.8.0

stable2026-10-27

Applications and installers that ask Windows for administrator rights no longer open as ordinary windows on the desktop. A setup wizard that took a while to draw its first window, or a setup program that started the application it had just installed, could previously end up outside RunContainer; that window now opens inside RunContainer too.
An installer that shows more than one window — an unpacking window, the setup wizard, then a progress or finish window — used to have only its first window inside RunContainer. All of them appear inside RunContainer now, and a smaller window keeps its own size instead of being stretched to fill the space.
The application a setup program installs is shown inside RunContainer as soon as setup finishes, rather than starting as a separate window on the desktop.
Fixed an empty window after Stop. Stopping an application could leave a blank RunContainer window behind; that no longer happens.
Release installers are still not code-signed, so Windows may warn before the installer runs. The Downloads page explains why, and how to verify your download.

Release details

0.7.9

stable2026-10-27

RC-Brain 5 replaces RC-Brain 4: 13,632 parameters instead of 9,088, because the corpus now carries several wordings for each condition instead of one. “Requires administrator privileges”, “elevation is required” and “requested operation requires elevation” are the same fact to a person, and only the first used to be a fact to the feature extractor. The broader corpus was trained twice with the same seed, changing only network width: the narrow pair scored 82.8% on unseen failure families and 93.9% on the final split, the wide pair 92.2% and 94.8%.
Measured results for RC-Brain 5: 99.7% on familiar holdout variants (99.1% action), 92.2% on whole failure families absent from training (up from 90.6%), 94.8% on an untouched final split (94.2% action, 310 cases), zero unsafe destructive actions on every split, and 0% repairs proposed for normal behaviour on the final split. The 16-case restraint set is still answered correctly only 25% of the time, and every miss is the same scenario — an app that has logged nothing at all yet — which is stated rather than rounded away.
Fixed a trainer that could ship a model which had failed its own release gates. The active-model registry was written before the thresholds were evaluated, so a failing run still became the shipped model; one did, leaving the app pointed at a model file that had never passed. Gates are now checked first and only a passing run touches the registry. Rollback now records the artefact that was actually active instead of the one before it, so it cannot skip a version, and the candidate trainer no longer inspects a hard-coded file name from RC-Brain 2 — which had made every promoted-experience candidate report as failed.
The app line now answers “did the AI use its tools?”. It names the tool used on the incident — Dispatch specialist agents, with what each one measured, or Consult the Runbook, with the signature that matched — and when no tool was used it says exactly that, instead of the silence that used to read as “it did something and did not tell you”.
A setup program that has not drawn its window yet is explained instead of looking stuck: while an unattended setup runs, the app’s line says it is still working inside this environment and counts how long, and where the wizard has to be shown it is hosted in the app’s RunContainer window. When automatic repair has spent its budget for an app, the message says so, names the state it is still in, and says what to do next instead of repeating a repair the policy will refuse.
Enable JIT is a control, not a claim: pick a runtime and a strategy in Tweaks, press Enable JIT, and that app starts straight away with the strategy applied on the way in. Compiling .NET IL is a real JIT; a native executable is already machine code, so the same button says that plainly rather than pretending a switch helped, and an executable it could not classify applies no strategy at all rather than a guessed one.
First launch is a walkthrough of the whole app in ten steps, 0/9 to 9/9: the idea, how a run works, then Updates, Info, Profiles, Settings, Tweaks, Apps, Sources, and where to get help and support the project. It is shown once per installation and never again, including after an update, and an installation that predates it still sees it once.
Documentation: the introduction starts with a video you can play on the page, the Support page names the YouTube channel and the Discord, and this page, the downloads page, the FAQ and the RC-Brain page now describe RC-Brain 5 with its measured numbers.

Release details

0.7.8

stable2026-10-26

The app list shows the icon the executable actually carries. RunContainer reads the icon frames out of the program file itself — the same source Windows Explorer uses — and rebuilds a genuine multi-size icon, so installers and tools that used to show as a bare letter now show their own icon and name. Where a program carries no icon at all, the shell is asked as a second choice instead of a letter being shown.
Apps that are really their own setup program say so. When the program you added is an Inno Setup, NSIS, InstallShield, WiX or MSI installer, the app list labels it and either completes setup inside the environment (“Set up in the background”, where the installer has a documented unattended mode) or keeps the wizard in its own RunContainer window. While an unattended setup runs, that line counts how long it has been working inside this environment, so a setup that takes minutes no longer looks like an app that never appears.
Setup completion is observed rather than assumed. RunContainer follows the setup process tree to its exit, searches the environment for the executable setup produced, and records it, so Run starts the app instead of its installer. If setup produced nothing, it says exactly that instead of claiming success.
RC-Brain 4 replaces the previous model: 9,088 parameters over 75 observation features and 13 actions. The new action consults the Runbook, a hard-coded table of exact documented signatures (Windows errors, setup exit codes and documented RunContainer states) with their meaning, and the agents’ own measurements are added as features.
RC-Brain now has two tools, and only two. The first dispatches specialist agents: six fixed read-only evidence probes (engine, window, process, filesystem, logs, setup), then three agents that reason over what they measured — a research agent that searches RunContainer’s bundled documentation and the incidents already verified on this machine, offline in both cases, an expert agent that works the whole documented rule set and names the measurement it is missing rather than guessing, and a harmony agent that resolves a disagreement between the model and the expert by explicit rules and refuses to choose when both conclusions rest on equal evidence and equal risk. The second tool consults the hard-coded Runbook. The model chooses which tool to use and nothing else about either: it cannot author an agent, give one arguments, run a command through one or add a table entry, a dispatch happens at most once per incident, and everything the agents return still goes through the same safety policy the model’s own proposal goes through.
Held-out results for RC-Brain 4: 99.7% on familiar holdout variants, 90.6% on whole failure families absent from training, 95.1% on an untouched final split, zero unsafe destructive actions on every split. The Runbook action has no held-out figure, because the held-out splits contain no instance of it; that is stated rather than left out.
Fixed evidence that looked complete but was not. Temporal evidence — how long a problem had lasted, whether it had recurred, whether it had only just cleared — was never measured at all, so the model was being asked to work without it; the monitor now tracks incidents properly. A window owned by the elevated launcher was reported as “no window”, which is how a working app could be restarted; those windows are now reported separately and measured.
Fixed re-rendering the old icon. A record whose icon came from an older extractor is now upgraded, because the decision is based on which extractor wrote the file rather than on its name, and when setup finishes and Run starts a different executable the icon is extracted again from that file, so the tile shows the app rather than its installer.
Apps that are still starting are no longer restarted. A launch is reported as running as soon as its process is verified, so an app that simply has not drawn its window yet is waited for inside the 10 second window budget while a genuinely hung one is still restarted after it.
Fixed a rollback path that could have left RunContainer with no model at all. The previous model predates the agents’ features and its 66 features are exactly the first 66 of this build’s 75, so it now loads and reads that prefix instead of being rejected as incompatible; the shipped model itself must still match the whole schema.

Release details

Full changelog →

Contribute

Help shape RunContainer

Bug reports, compatibility notes and documentation fixes are all valuable. Read the contribution guide to see how to take part.

Contribution guide Community & links

RunContainerWindows apps, kept in their own space.

Managed environments

Application management

Kept apart

Easier clean-up

A managed home for your Windows applications

Ordinary installation

With RunContainer

See RunContainer in action

Four steps, from install to clean-up

Create an environment

Install the application

Run it from RunContainer

Keep or clean up

New to RunContainer?

Isolation helps. It is not a guarantee.

Reduces impact

Not malware protection

Mind your credentials

Common questions

Release highlights

0.8.0

0.7.9

0.7.8

Help shape RunContainer