A module the image ships runs again when its installed version cannot load

Some modules exist twice on an installation: once inside the platform image, as the built-in baseline, and once as a newer version installed from the store. The store version wins while it works — that is what installing it means — and the platform measures, at every start, whether the installed bytes still load on the platform now running.

When that measurement said no, the installation was supposed to keep the version it had. For a store-only module it does (the previous installed version). But for a module the image also ships, the built-in copy was never tried: the installed version had taken the built-in one's place on the list before anything was measured, so a refusal left the module absent. That is worse than never having installed it. On the public instance the module that renders the standard view skins was in exactly this state after a platform update, and every skinned panel showed its plain-text fallback instead of the view.

The fallback now has a third step. The order is: the newest installed version, then the previous installed version, then the copy the image ships — each one measured the same way — and only when none of them loads is the module absent. When the image's copy runs, the start-up log says so (runs the image-shipped baseline because v1.3.0 cannot load here: …), the pending_module_activation health check names it as running behind rather than as "restart required", the installation's module-set record shows @image as the running version, and the package card reads the same sentence. As soon as a build of the installed version that loads on this platform is published, the installation adopts it, exactly as it does for a previous-version fallback.

One shape is out of reach and is now named instead of silent: a version whose files loaded and whose registration then failed occupies the module's name in the process, so nothing else of that name can take over until the next start. The log says which built-in copy it could not use and why.