Unable to restart/reboot/update HA

Hello there, I would appreciate any help with updating HA core. First I had an issue with upgrading to 2024.8.0/1. After several restarts I decided to start with a fresh installation with a backup which was worked perfectly and I got 2024.8.2 version. Now there is another one but I do have the same issue there. I am not able to update it. It was running for six hours now and only thing I saw was Connection lost and nothing else happens. I guess another fresh restart would work but I don’t want to do that anytime there is an upgrade. No idea what causing this and where can I check what exactly is wrong. What may be somehow correlated is I am not even able to restart/reboot/shutdown HA via GUI. I can only kill VM machine via Task manager as anytime I try to restart/update/shutdown it cannot be stopped/powered off.
In my logs I can only see this:
The zigbee part is probably just because some battery devices are now unavailable? But that json thing is something I have no idea what to do with it, if that is causing the issue. Any idea what to check and fix?

2024-08-31 21:14:25.092 ERROR (SyncWorker_2) [homeassistant.util.json] Could not parse JSON content: /config/.storage/lovelace.map
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/src/homeassistant/homeassistant/util/json.py", line 75, in load_json
    return orjson.loads(fdesc.read())  # type: ignore[no-any-return]
           ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
orjson.JSONDecodeError: Input is a zero-length, empty document: line 1 column 1 (char 0)
2024-08-31 21:14:50.408 WARNING (MainThread) [zigpy.application] Zigbee channel 25 utilization is 92.96%!
2024-08-31 21:14:50.409 WARNING (MainThread) [zigpy.application] If you are having problems joining new devices, are missing sensor updates, or have issues keeping devices joined, ensure your coordinator is away from interference sources such as USB 3.0 devices, SSDs, WiFi routers, etc.
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Just a little update to my original question. After super frustration with killing the machine everyday I decided to reinstall whole system, crystal clear Windows, python, virtualbox, homeassistant. Therefore I am starting from scratch. It worked smoothly, I could reboot, restart, shut down the system from GUI or via VM. Nice. Only until there is an added integration, so far sonoff zigbee dongle. After that I am not able to do anything again. I can only kill the VM from task manager, anything else makes HA or VM unresponsive/unreachable. There’s no logs to check now, they are all empty or without any warning/error messages. Is it really just me?

You might try another hypervisor, VMware on windows, but if you don’t need windows, proxmox is the way to go.

Well, I have to say I was a bit afraid of VMware because of the configuration steps but it seems it is the right choice. Thank you.