Unable to Associate App in Visual Studio for Store Submission - "The store blocked this account"

I am experiencing a critical issue when trying to create an application package for an existing app in the Microsoft Partner Center. My development environment is Visual Studio 2022, and the project is a .NET 8 WinUI 3 application.

The core problem occurs when I attempt to associate my project with the app identity in the store using the Visual Studio packaging wizard (Project > Publish > Create App Packages...). When I select the option to associate with the Microsoft Store, I receive the following error message:

"The store blocked this account. Ensure the account has permission to read reserved app names and that it is linked to a valid Developer subscription."

Troubleshooting Steps Already Taken:

1. Partner Center Account Verification: I have logged into the Microsoft Partner Center and confirmed that:

• Developer program type: Individual.

• My developer account is active and in good standing.

• I have no access to the Role Administration view in the Partner Portal since I have no Entre ID credentials.

• The app name is correctly reserved.

2. Visual Studio Re-authentication: I have signed out of my Microsoft account in Visual Studio (File > Account Settings > Remove) and signed back in to refresh the authentication tokens. The issue persists.

Consequences of this Issue:

Because the association process fails, Visual Studio cannot retrieve the official publisher identity from the store. As a result, it falls back to using a local, temporary signing certificate.

This leads to the following downstream problems:

• The generated MSIX package is signed with an incorrect publisher identity.

• Consequently, the Package Family Name of the generated package is incorrect (it has the wrong publisher hash).

• When I upload this package to the Partner Center, it is rejected with "Invalid package family name" and "Invalid package publisher name" errors.

Manually editing the Package.appxmanifest with the correct Publisher and Name values from the Partner Center does not solve the problem, as the incorrect signing certificate overrides these values during the packaging process.

In summary, I am in a blocked state where I cannot generate a correctly signed package for a store update because the Visual Studio association process is failing, despite my Partner Center account appearing to be valid and having the correct permissions.

Could you please investigate why the store API might be blocking my account within the Visual Studio environment and advise on how to resolve this authentication/permission issue?