The server binds AFTER ~250ms of plugin/sim init, so a random-port collision (os error 98) escapes the 0.15s spawn-liveness check and surfaced as a hard test failure at the push gate. Death during the connect window now retries on a fresh port within MAX_PORT_ATTEMPTS. Verified: targeted suite 6/6. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>