Hello,
I have been following the issue of individual VMs not being restarted after they were updated since July 2025. At that time I was running v4.2.4. I noted that this issue behavior was resolved for some and not others in another post that perfectly described the issue: AppVMs not restarting after update. However, that post had errors involved and I did not locate those same errors or see much of anything in the logs that seemed related. This was not resolved for me.
Recently I did an inplace upgrade to version 4.3.0 without issue 
and was hoping the issue would be resolved with the upgrade, but unfortunately the vm update restart issue apparently came along despite the upgrade. 
Except for this minor annoyance Qubes OS is working just great!! (kudos and thanks to the Development Team and everyone involved for all your work on Qubes OS! It is an awesome OS.)
I should note that interestingly it does restart the “service qubes” just fine ie. sys-net, sys-firewall, sys-vpn and excludes my usb keyboard (thankfully!) and this behavior has not changed. It is just any other non-service vms that Qubes reported needed to be restarted. Instead it shuts them down and leaves them sit.
The fact it does service qubes but not the others should be helpful to know for someone to troubleshoot with.
Does anyone have a procedure of things that I can check on this? It’s not critical of course, just disappointing that the issue didn’t resolve with the upgrade. Please keep it simple though if you will as I try to stay out of dom0 unless I really need to be there…
I have used the gui entirely to check and to set this. Perhaps I am misunderstanding the settings? I’ve included a pic of my gui settings for ref.
Thanks for any assistance!
Lastly, I did find this couple lines while I was digging around which occurred about the time stamp that I did an update a while back. It seems to report something isn’t being created or is being dropped too soon for the restart to happen for the "handle_agent_restart
( IDK maybe it isn’t even relevant to this issue and is reporting on something else? Not sure but I thought I would mention it.)
Unknown capability x-canonical-private-icon-only detected
Server capabilities: body markup true, persistence false
Entering loop
Next ID is 2, mapping to host ID 33
2026-01-16 09:10:09.122 qrexec-daemon[8559]: process_io.c:250:qrexec_process_io: vchan connection closed early (fds: 4 4 -1, status: -1 -1)
2026-01-16 09:10:09.208 qrexec-daemon[8519]: qrexec-daemon.c:1793:main: qrexec-agent has disconnected
2026-01-16 09:10:09.653 qrexec-daemon[8546]: process_io.c:250:qrexec_process_io: vchan connection closed early (fds: 5 6 -1, status: -1 -1)
Leaving loop
domain dead
2026-01-16 09:10:14.340 qrexec-daemon[8519]: qrexec-daemon.c:1649:handle_agent_restart: cannot connect to qrexec agent: No such file or directory
2026-01-16 09:10:14.340 qrexec-daemon[8519]: qrexec-daemon.c:1795:main: Failed to reconnect to qrexec-agent, terminating
in