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True, the obvious cause is an update. My point was more, as I said this problem has been around since way before any spectre update... One can only imagine that the update causing this was to the virus scanner, leading me to believe that these files were simply not scanned prior to this update. For ...

yeah, well the same AVIRA install and virtual box have been living together for > 3 years. It's strange that this now becomes a problem. Ah well...

It appears AVIRA is the culprit. I noticed this process performing lot's of I/O during the lag phase (both turn on and poweroff). I have now placed my VMs on the ignore list in : /Applications/Avira.app/Contents/config/avguard.conf

It appears to fix it.

Yes please find it attached (the machine had to run overnight, so I just relaunched and shut down again no peripherals). Thanks for your help in this again. I should also point out my PhD student (also on a mac) has the same issue... One thing that could be the cause is that we have not yet upgraded...

Dear Socratis, Thanks! Yes I have a dock with additional screen and ethernet, and a separate additional monitor over HDMI. Just tried and: indeed without any other connected peripherals I got a fast boot (still, also before the upgrade with screen I would also occasionally receive a fast boot). With...

I am seeing this also and it is very frustrating indeed. It happen before you see the 'virtualbox splash screen' Also when shutting down there is a few minutes (!) delay in going from shutdown --> poweroff... I have attached the logs of a good boot and a bad boot. For me this started happening aroun...