Scene strip now renders in canonical F-key order regardless of persisted SortOrder. The strip loads Scenes ORDER BY SortOrder while each tab's F-key label is name-derived, so a session that persisted Chat before BRB (found on the creator's DB: SortOrder 2/3) showed tabs 'Chat F4' then 'BRB F3'. MainViewModel.LoadLayout now calls the new ReorderScenesToCanonical() - the five canonical scenes reorder to Starting, Live, BRB, Chat, Ending (F1-F5, stable among renamed non-canonical scenes), and the next auto-save re-stamps SortOrder so the heal persists. One integration test (SceneOrderTests) seeds the swapped-order DB and asserts loaded order, F1-F5 labels, and that a save persists the corrected ordering. 423 pass, 0 build warnings. (Unit: scene order)

ViewModels/MainViewModel.Scenes.cs

@@ -196,6 +196,32 @@ public partial class MainViewModel
     public IEnumerable<string> MissingScenes
         => SceneCatalog.All.Where(canonical => Scenes.All(s => !SceneCatalog.Is(s.Name, canonical)));
 
+    /// <summary>
+    /// The five canonical scenes render in F-key order (Starting, Live, BRB, Chat,
+    /// Ending = F1-F5), whichever order the persisted SortOrder rows ended up in —
+    /// an older session can leave Chat before BRB (seen on the creator's DB).
+    /// Renamed (non-canonical) scenes keep their loaded order AFTER the canonical
+    /// five. Stable <see cref="Enumerable.OrderBy"/>, so one pass; the next
+    /// auto-save re-stamps each SortOrder to its corrected index.
+    /// </summary>
+    private void ReorderScenesToCanonical()
+    {
+        var target = Scenes.OrderBy(s => CanonicalIndex(s.Name)).ToList();
+        for (var i = 0; i < target.Count; i++)
+        {
+            var current = Scenes.IndexOf(target[i]);
+            if (current != i) Scenes.Move(current, i);
+        }
+    }
+
+    private static int CanonicalIndex(string? name)
+    {
+        if (name == null) return SceneCatalog.All.Length;
+        for (var i = 0; i < SceneCatalog.All.Length; i++)
+            if (SceneCatalog.Is(name, SceneCatalog.All[i])) return i;
+        return SceneCatalog.All.Length;
+    }
+
     /// <summary>Only show the "+" button when one of the five canonical scenes is missing.</summary>
     public bool ShowAddScene => MissingScenes.Any();
 

ViewModels/MainViewModel.cs

@@ -411,6 +411,7 @@ public partial class MainViewModel : ViewModelBase
                 foreach (var name in SceneCatalog.All)
                     AddScene(name);
             }
+            ReorderScenesToCanonical();
             HealBackgrounds();
             HealZoomLayers();
             RefreshHotkeyLabels();