- Control UI: show loading, reload, and retry states when a lazy dashboard panel cannot load after an upgrade, so the Logs tab no longer appears blank on stale browser bundles. Fixes #72450. Thanks @sobergou.

- Gateway/plugins: start the Gateway in degraded mode when a single plugin entry has invalid schema config, and let `openclaw doctor --fix` quarantine that plugin config instead of crash-looping every channel. Fixes #62976 and #70371. Thanks @Doraemon-Claw and @pksidekyk.

- Agents/plugins: skip malformed plugin tools with missing schema objects and report plugin diagnostics, so one broken tool no longer crashes Anthropic agent runs. Fixes #69423. Thanks @jmnickels.

- Dashboard: log a CVE-safe self-recovery hint pointing users to `OPENCLAW_GATEWAY_TOKEN`, `gateway.auth.token`, and fragment key `token` when neither clipboard nor browser delivery places the token-bearing URL within reach, so headless and WSL invocations are not stranded on the bare URL. Fixes #72081. Thanks @praveen9354 and @BunsDev.

- Agents/reasoning: recover fully wrapped unclosed `<think>` replies that would otherwise sanitize to empty text while keeping strict stripping for closed reasoning blocks and unclosed tails after visible text. Fixes #37696; supersedes #51915. Thanks @druide67 and @okuyam2y.

- Control UI/Gateway: bind WebChat handshakes to their active socket and reject post-close server registrations, so aborted connects no longer leave zombie clients or misleading duplicate WebSocket connection logs. Fixes #72753. Thanks @LumenFromTheFuture.

- Agents/fallback: split ambiguous provider failures into `empty_response`, `no_error_details`, and `unclassified`, and add flat fallback-step fields to structured fallback logs so primary-model failures stay visible when later fallbacks also fail. Fixes #71922; refs #71744. Thanks @andyk-ms and @nikolaykazakovvs-ux.