The per-user MSI installer is stateful across runs on a persistent VM: once a
version is registered, a later /quiet install no-ops and never lands at the new
TargetDir, so python.exe went missing. Switch to a standalone CPython from
nuget cached under LOCALAPPDATA — no registry/PATH changes, idempotent, reused
across runs. A pre-existing Python 3.11 on PATH is still honoured.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
shadowdaoandClaude Opus 4.8
0d0786e222