You’re very welcome! It’s a bit of a tricky issue so I’d like to get to the bottom of it.
The only variance I can think of that may result in some packages being caught by the firewall and others not are plugin changes. Any plugins that start an active network connection could feasibly be triggering the firewall. I’m not currently aware of any UE trickery that can avoid this, as the issue lies in Windows being sensitive.
As the firewall was triggered once back in March, it’s very likely that it’s cached that trigger and is automatically untrusting of the packaged project, even with re-packages. I recommend clearing your Firewall cache and seeing if it will prevent the trigger from happening again.
I’ve been unable to reproduce the issue on my end with your repro steps, but as I’m using basic template projects it may not be a perfect 1-to-1 replica of the results. I will try a few more times to get it to trigger however.
Please let me know if the SHA256 hash whitelist works, as this will be excellent information!