Cowork VM stuck in delete-reinstall-download cycle, service fails to start (MSIX)

Bug Report: Cowork VM Service Fails to Start

Platform: Windows 11 Pro (10.0.26200), Claude Desktop installed as MSIX Store app

Issue:
Cowork gets stuck on "Starting Claude's workspace..." and never progresses. The VM service (CoworkVMService) fails to start with "VM service not running. The service failed to start."

This triggers a repeating cycle:

1. Cowork attempts to start → VM service fails
2. VM bundle gets deleted and re-downloaded (~8.6 GB rootfs.vhdx)
3. Cycle repeats endlessly

Details:

• Hyper-V services (HvHost, vmcompute, vmms) are all running correctly
• The issue appears to be in Claude's own VM initialization, not Hyper-V
• sc.exe config CoworkVMService returns "Access is denied" even from elevated PowerShell, suggesting the MSIX packaging restricts service configuration
• Re-registering the MSIX package (Add-AppxPackage -Register) does not resolve the issue
• User has attempted this 10+ times with the same result

Expected behavior:
Cowork VM should start successfully, or at minimum should not enter an infinite download loop consuming ~8.6 GB per cycle.

Workaround:
Manually deleting %APPDATA%\Claude\vm_bundles\claudevm.bundle stops the download loop but obviously breaks Cowork entirely.

Impact:

• ~8.6 GB bandwidth consumed per cycle
• Disk space exhaustion risk on smaller drives
• No way for users to disable the cycle without admin access or manual file deletion