Thanks for the tip, not having any issues saving the XLM document after adding that in, so at least that's working better.
As for actually getting a VM working, it's somehow going much worse today than yesterday. I did see a brief blip of HDMI out, which was a new first and probably a good sign, but every time I start the VM unraid loses the flash drive after a few moments, the VM becomes unreachable, and I need to reboot everything.
If I had to guess, either it's attempting to pass through all of the USB ports and losing the flash drive, or maybe it's just more bad igpu passthrough issues dropping the ball. Really baffling because it worked at least a couple of times yesterday, but today turning on the VM instantly breaks it, and I can't remote desktop at all. I've tried making a brand new VM following the instructions in this thread to a T, XML config is good, IOMMU groups are good, iGPU and audio are in their own groups without any USB controllers, so I don't know why the flash drive would be getting bumped off while the rest of the array stays 'on'
EDIT, took a peek at the array logs when I kick off the VM. what stands out to me is that a bunch of things are timing out, but really I don't have a clue what this is about or how to fix it. Snippet ends when bunch of USBs disconnect which leads to all of the errors associated with the flash drive being gone.
Edit 2: flash drive doesn't disconnect after I moved it to the front panel - not ideal for aesthetic reasons but maybe not a permanent change. I can now attempt to spin up the VM as much as I want without it impacting the array. Still consistently not taking off properly when using igpu passthrough though, logs continue to show many timeouts and remoting in is a no-go. Adding the server logs
logs.txt
VMlogs.txt