What changed

• added explicit Windows update phase markers in the npm-update Parallels helper so outer progress output reflects guest work
• added guarded Windows helper launch retries plus incremental guest-log draining for the npm-update wrapper
• applied the same launch/log-drain improvements to the standalone Windows smoke onboard and gateway helper flows
• preserved pre-phase onboard markers by appending the command output instead of replacing the log

Why

Windows helper phases could be healthy while the outer wrapper showed only waiting for first log line, and a transport flake before guest files materialized produced weak diagnostics.

Impact

Parallels smoke runs are easier to monitor and earlier Windows helper failures are easier to diagnose without changing the happy-path test flow.

Root cause

The wrapper only drained guest helper logs after completion or timeout, and the initial prlctl exec launcher path was not retried or surfaced clearly in the outer log.

Validation

• bash -n scripts/e2e/parallels-npm-update-smoke.sh
• bash -n scripts/e2e/parallels-windows-smoke.sh
• pnpm test:parallels:npm-update -- --json