I don't suppose we can detect that logging has started and log the host version then? It would help with a wider variety of failures.

There may be a way with ETW, but I'd have to experiment a bit.

When you register an ETW provider, you can provide a callback which is used to tell you whether logging is enabled/disabled as well as the current level.  This code is in a low-level Chromium class though so we may not have access to it.  If we can register a second instance of the same provider GUID, then printing out debug info could work.

The other option that might be useful is to just output to a log file in TEMP like linux does.

I'm not sure it's worth changing how we do logging just so that we can get the host version in more situations than when a connection is received, but if there are other benefits, then it might be worth investigating. Enabling ETW is rather advanced for a typical user, so logging to a file might make more it easier. The downsides are potentially using up a lot of disk space. Overall, I think your original suggestion is probably a good compromise.