First real-world run of the #82328/#82366 hand-off (2026-08-09, ryanc)
surfaced two defects:
1. The console window never closes after the update finishes -- and
closing it manually KILLS the freshly relaunched GUI. Root cause:
Start-DesktopRelaunch spawned Hermes.exe as a child of the console
PowerShell. Electron/Chromium calls AttachConsole(ATTACH_PARENT_
PROCESS) at boot, so the new Desktop latched onto the hand-off's
console: the console can't close while an attached process lives,
and closing it takes the attached GUI down with it. Fix: create the
process via WMI (Win32_Process.Create) -- parent becomes WmiPrvSE,
no console to inherit or attach, same detachment explorer.exe gives
a normal launch. Start-Process fallback retained (tethered Desktop
beats no Desktop).
2. Both the console and the progress box render hermes update's UTF-8
glyphs (checkmarks, arrows) as mojibake. PS 5.1 defaults redirected
child streams to the OEM codepage. Fix: StandardOutput/ErrorEncoding
= UTF8 on the child, PYTHONIOENCODING/PYTHONUTF8 so Python emits
UTF-8, and [Console]::OutputEncoding = UTF8 for our own echo.
Verified live on the incident machine: WMI-created process parents to
WmiPrvSE.exe (not the shell); UTF-8 glyph round-trip through the exact
ProcessStartInfo shape reads back byte-correct (15/15 chars). PS 5.1
parse clean, check-windows-footguns clean.
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