Highlights

• · Setup tells you what's actually happening. The wizard now uses calm 'Retrying' language when SpawnBox auto-recovers from a transient issue (instead of cryptic warnings that felt like failures). For users who want to look under the hood, a quietly-discoverable detail panel shows retry history. The non-technical default stays clutter-free; nothing in your face unless you go looking.
• · Stuck on a pending-reboot you didn't cause? There's now an escape hatch. If Windows had a system-pending-reboot SpawnBox didn't trigger (a separate Windows Update, a different installer, etc.), the setup wizard would keep telling you to reboot even after you did. One user rebooted five times before giving up. Now the wizard shows an 'Ignore & continue' button on the reboot-required step when SpawnBox detects the pending-reboot is external, so you can bypass it and let setup proceed.
• · A previous failed install no longer blocks the next attempt. If a prior install was killed mid-import (process kill, system crash, anything that interrupted the wsl-import step), the partial disk image file used to stay on disk and block every future install attempt with 'ERROR_FILE_EXISTS'. One user hit this for 14 minutes and gave up. SpawnBox now detects orphan disk images from interrupted previous installs and auto-recovers them so the next attempt proceeds cleanly.
• · Hard install failures bring up the report-sending dialog automatically. When a setup step gets genuinely stuck for 30+ seconds, the diagnostic-report dialog now auto-opens. You still go through the normal report flow, but you don't have to hunt for the 'Send us a report' link at the bottom-corner; it's right in front of you when you need it.
• · A class of silent install failures no longer leaves you stranded. Disk-full during Linux subsystem import that used to look like success, the Linux container runtime not actually registered after its installer exited cleanly, ghost-distro silent unregister no-ops, stale 'needs reboot' flags carried over from previous attempts. Each of these used to leave SpawnBox in a quietly-broken state where the wizard claimed it was done but nothing worked. They're now either auto-recovered or surfaced honestly. We expect this to substantially reduce the 'I installed it but nothing works' class of bug; if you still hit it, the one-click diagnostic path is your lifeline.
• · Long-running install steps no longer go dark. Installing the Linux subsystem runtime, downloading it, enabling Windows features, initializing the Linux container; all formerly silent steps now show real progress every 15 seconds. The wizard's status copy reflects what's actually happening instead of pretending nothing's happening during a multi-minute install.
• · Port forwarding now works on stricter routers. Some routers (older Asus and Netgear models, certain ISP-issued modems, MikroTik stock firmware) reject UPnP requests with timed leases and only accept permanent leases. SpawnBox previously logged a warning every 30 seconds and never recovered on those routers; now it detects the rejection and falls back to a permanent-lease request, restoring port forwarding for those users.
• · Smaller wins. Telemetry plugin/datapack detection now matches more server-name variants (so dashboards properly recognize installs with custom mod-pack names), the world-scanner walks the correct datapacks path (so the asset inventory reports accurately instead of showing 0 datapacks), apt-update real-exit detection catches Linux-side install failures that were previously masked by downstream errors, dashboard datetime and BusinessView refinements.