Following the hint "New in version 0.7: The Virtual Smart Card optionally brings its own standalone implementation of PC/SC. This allows accessing vpicc without PCSC-Lite. Our PC/SC implementation acts as replacement for libpcsclite which can lead to problems when used in parallel with PCSC-Lite.":
Looks like this problem only arises when you have pcscd already installed before installing virtualsmartcard. If I do not have it installed before, it works with 5a6b330 just as good as with 4658f86.

Actually I saw the described behavior in the mentioned commit again when I tried to connect more than once. So I updated the description of this issue and I reopen the issue again.

please try python3 vicc

It looks like 5a6b330 needs to be reverted as well...

looks like pfd is not initialized correctly.

Possible (untested) fix.  if someone to try this please submit the PR:

diff --git a/virtualsmartcard/src/vpcd/vpcd.c b/virtualsmartcard/src/vpcd/vpcd.c
index 8d3be0d..ee9e981 100644
--- a/virtualsmartcard/src/vpcd/vpcd.c
+++ b/virtualsmartcard/src/vpcd/vpcd.c
@@ -197,8 +197,10 @@ SOCKET waitforclient(SOCKET server, long secs, long usecs)
     struct pollfd pfd;
 
     pfd.fd = server;
+    pfd.events = POLLIN;
+    pfd.revents = 0;
 
-    timeout = (secs * 1000000 + usecs / 1000);
+    timeout = (secs * 1000 + usecs / 1000);
 
     if (poll(&pfd, 1, timeout) == -1)
         return INVALID_SOCKET;

The timeout argument specifies the number of milliseconds, but looks like is secs and usecs are always zero in this code.

You are right. Tested with above changes in container and all stuff works as expected. Testing again with master shows us our known issue no-readers.

thanks for helping to everyone!