I spent way too long troubleshooting this. Reinstalled Docker Desktop multiple times, wiped config folders, checked WSL, verified Hyper-V — nothing worked. Turns out the fix was two PowerShell commands. Here's what happened and how to fix it fast if you run into the same thing. The Situation My ThinkPad T480 got a BIOS and firmware update. After rebooting, Docker Desktop stopped launching. No error dialog, no crash message — it just silently died every time. The whale icon would never show up in the system tray. Running wsl --list showed no docker-desktop distro. The logs had nothing useful — just Docker initializing and then abruptly stopping. Looked like a WSL problem, a virtualization problem, or a busted installation. It was none of those. What Was Actually Wrong The BIOS update disrupted Windows service configurations. The Docker Desktop backend service — com.docker.service — got flipped to Manual startup, so it was no longer running when Windows booted.…