After reaching a dead end getting hardware debugging to work through Visual Micro for the LILYGO T-Display S3 board (https://www.visualmicro.com/forums/YaBB.pl?num=1700578530/14), I am trying to get serial debugging to work.

After programming and uploading to this board it automatically stops working as a serial port The port used to upload, COM12 in this case, disappears from Device Manager.  It feels like I must be missing something, have a setting wrong, or something else?

I like a lot of the features of this board and so would really like to work with it more, but to do so effectively I will need something better that pin-wiggling to debug.  Any advice will be appreciated.

Wanted to share observations from additional testing:
     
The project I am having the trouble with as reported in the original post is the same one I set up for hardware debugging, hoping to leverage the built-in JTAG over USB capability of this board (as discussed in this thread: https://www.visualmicro.com/forums/YaBB.pl?num=1700578530/14). ; As requested, a shot of the debug menu for that project is attached ("Debug menu - not working").
     
I created a new project, using the VM new empty Arduino project template, targeting the LilyGo T-Display S3 board and everything worked great, and as expected, uploading the code and debugging over USB.  For complete context, this board normally requires a button press combination to put it into bootloader mode, which for this newly created project I had to do only once when initially uploading the code.  Once uploaded the code executes and serial debugging works fine, although stopping debugging through VM also stops the program running on the target board - interesting and different from the other ESP32 based boards I use, but not a problem.  Unlike with the earlier project, the serial connection remains intact - I can make changes, recompile and re-upload my code without having to reset the board into bootloader mode manually.  See attached ("Debug menu - works").