TLDR: turn off fast boot in Win10 for reliable startup of the EOS Utility if you leave your camera plugged in via USB all the time.
I want to log my experience for any others who might benefit.
The camera is permanently affixed and I setup a PC with it so I could remote in if needed to make minor adjustments. The installation is high up on an interior wall and I installed a switch inline w/ the power brick so I can turn it on w/o a ladder.
So this is not likely a use case the Canon software developers imagined.
When turning on the system, EOS Utility would often not start correctly (I don't think it crashed). It would act like there was no camera attached until killed by task manager & restarted. The bigger problem though is the HDMI output from the camera would show a screen saying it was connecting to PC, but it never would. So the HDMI would hang until EOS Utility was restarted. This is the bigger problem if you expect to turn on the system and have HDMI output to 'just work'.
After several months of dealing with this I happened to try turning off fast boot in Windows. Now EOS Utility starts reliably!
