GeezerVison

Backport of #27782 to release/v7.6.7

Triggered by Dongbo Wang (@daxian-dbw) on behalf of Dongbo Wang (@daxian-dbw)

Original CL Label: CL-General

/cc @PowerShell/powershell-maintainers

Impact

REQUIRED: Choose either Tooling Impact or Customer Impact (or both). At least one checkbox must be selected.

Tooling Impact

• Required tooling change
• Optional tooling change (include reasoning)

Customer Impact

• Customer reported
• Found internally

Fixes an issue where, on MSIX-packaged PowerShell installations, the $PSHOME directory (which contains a version number) was prepended to PATH at startup. Because this path changes on every MSIX update, cached references to it (e.g., by cmake) become invalid after an update. The fix uses the stable ExecutionAlias directory instead.

Regression

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• Yes
• No

This is not a regression.

Testing

Original PR was manually tested against MSIX-packaged PowerShell installations, verifying that the ExecutionAlias directory is prepended to PATH instead of the version-specific $PSHOME path, and that this remains stable across MSIX package updates. Backport verified by confirming the cherry-pick applied cleanly with no conflicts on release/v7.6.7.

Risk

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• High
• Medium
• Low

Medium risk: changes core startup logic that modifies the PATH environment variable, but the change is narrowly scoped to MSIX installation detection and doesn't affect non-MSIX installations. The fix addresses a real reliability issue where PATH entries become invalid after an MSIX update.