Parallels 18: guest VMs will not start automatically with system neither suspend on shutdown

I've encountered a bug where when I have guest virtual machines (the kind does not matter: it happens, for example, with Windows guests and Linux guests) set to "When Mac starts" or "When user logs in" the guests will not start up. Perhaps similarly, when I have guest virtual machines set to "Suspend" for "On Mac Shutdown" they do not suspend and simply are "stopped" or killed and the guest recognizes a need to check filesystem consistency (both for Windows and Linux) when the Mac is restarted.

I have tried various different options, but the only thing I can get to work reliably so far is to set Startup to "When Parallels Desktop starts" for startup and to manually suspend the virtual machines before a system shutdown.

This is a major headache since I'm running usually over 10 concurrent virtual machines on this system as a server.

Could you please advise as to options that might help resolve this? Is there a system service / Launch Daemon that's not set to start up properly for Parallels? Anything else I can check?

And what might prevent Parallels from suspending virtual machines on shutdown?

The following are the optimal settings I would like to see function - that currently do not:

 

Parallels folks - PLEASE review this. It seems that no one is hearing me and I cannot get anyone to ever respond, even in past attempts to contact support directly. So frustrating!