I am running my XP partition seamlessly as a guest in a Ubuntu host environment. I have created a separate hardware profile for the VirtualBox, and (barring a bit of adventure with re-activations, and realising that I must unmount the XP partition before booting it under VirtualBox!) it all works very well. (Having read the warnings about raw disk access, I decided to use only the one partition, rather than the whole disk, as this seems slightly safer.)
However, when I boot XP natively, the mouse pointer behaves erratically - it flies all round the screen and there are constant left- and right-clicks, and only about 50% of the time will it calm down (if I unplug my external mouse and switch off the mouse touchpad and wait a minute or two). This despite the fact that I boot natively using a different hardware profile.
Is it because Guest Additions runs at boot time and expects the mouse to be seamlessly controlled by its Ubuntu host (which is not present when running XP natively!)? If so, is there any way to stop the Guest Additions running at boot time when native? Perhaps I could incorporate something into the same Linux script I run to copy the wpa.dbl files over for activation purposes, if I knew what to alter.
Any suggestions welcome.