Phone link needs reset after every reboot

Posting this in case others are hitting the same regression, and to see if anyone found a real fix.

Setup
- Windows 11 (fully updated) 25H2 Build 26200.9278
- Galaxy S23+
- Phone Link paired and working fine for months

Symptom
Since roughly the last week of August, Phone Link fails to connect to my phone on every Windows startup. Bluetooth drivers are fine, phone Bluetooth is fine, nothing changed on the phone side. If I Reset the Phone Link app (Settings > Apps > Phone Link > Reset), it connects again immediately. But on the very next Windows restart, it's broken again. So it's a repeating, boot-persistent thing, not a one-off.

What I found in Event Viewer
There are two distinct crash phases and the switch lines up exactly with when my problem started:

- Jul 23 - Aug 12: repeated crashes in YourPhoneAppProxy.exe (v1.26061-1.26062):
System.ObjectDisposedException: Cannot access a disposed object. Object name: 'YourPhone.Services.RegistrationServices'
The app was recovering from these, so things mostly worked.

- Aug 26 onward (when it broke): Phone Link silently auto-updated to 1.26071.164.0, and the crash changed to PhoneExperienceHost.exe dying with a hard access violation (0xc0000005) inside Microsoft.UI.Xaml.Internal.dll - part of the Windows App SDK runtime, not Phone Link's own code.

PhoneExperienceHost.exe is the process that holds the live connection state. When it crashes hard instead of shutting down cleanly, it looks like the session state gets corrupted, the next boot inherits the bad state and fails to connect, and Reset works only because it wipes and rebuilds that state from scratch - until the next crash.

The likely trigger
Three of my four Windows App Runtime packages were installed on 26/08/2026, the exact day the new crash signature appeared. I have Microsoft.WindowsAppRuntime.2 version 2.4.0.0 installed - but winget's official catalog only knows about up to 2.3.1. So 2.4.0.0 didn't come from the normal winget/Store channel; it looks like it was bootstrapped alongside the Phone Link 1.26071.164.0 update itself. A fresh, less-tested runtime build fits an access-violation regression in the XAML layer.

What I've tried
- App Reset - works, but only until the next restart (temporary)
- winget upgrade Microsoft.WindowsAppRuntime.1.7 → "No available upgrade found"
- winget upgrade Microsoft.WindowsAppRuntime.2.4 → "No installed package found matching input criteria"
- winget list --name "WindowsAppRuntime" confirms 2.4.0.0 is installed; winget search shows nothing newer than 2.3.1 available, so there's no "fix forward" path through winget

Questions for anyone who's hit this

1. Anyone downgraded WindowsAppRuntime.2 to 2.3.1 (winget install Microsoft.WindowsAppRuntime.2 --version 2.3.1 --force) and had it stick / fix Phone Link?
2. Anyone pinned Phone Link to a build older than 1.26071.164.0 and blocked its auto-update?
3. Has Microsoft acknowledged this anywhere? The combo is specific: Phone Link 1.26071.164.0 + WindowsAppRuntime.2 2.4.0.0 + 0xc0000005 in Microsoft.UI.Xaml.Internal.dll.

Thanks in advance.