After a corporate VPN is disconnected, every other application resolves hostnames normally, but Cursor's agents keep failing with DNS errors and reloading the window changes nothing. What clears it?

The principle — Environment settings, including DNS configuration picked up from a VPN client, are read when a process starts and stay with it. Reloading the window rebuilds the interface without restarting the application, so an inherited resolver survives it untouched.

Why the key is correct — Cursor can inherit DNS settings from a previously active VPN, and the documented fix is a full restart rather than a window reload. That also explains why the rest of the machine resolves normally while Cursor alone fails.

Why the others are wrong — Reinstalling is unnecessary, because nothing was written to disk. Signing in again touches the account, not the process environment. And reconnecting the tunnel merely hides the stale configuration.

Remember this — A reload refreshes the window; a restart refreshes the process, and network oddities want the second.

Sources — Cursor's Network, proxy, and remote connections help page.