Desktop Window Manager crashes in Windows 8?

[jglogan]

I've seen this from Windows 8 developer preview through to the latest RTM and updates when running on VirtualBox, and I was wondering if anyone had ideas for troubleshooting or working around this.

I'm running on VBox 4.2.4 on a Mac host (OS X 10.7.5 on a MacBook Pro).

The main symptom is intermittent flickering of the desktop. When it's particularly bad, the desktop crashes out to the login screen, killing all of the desktop apps in the process.

I looked through the big Windows 8 thread and saw a couple of things that looked like this, and have tried most of the suggestions I saw there to no avail. Here's what I've observed relating to the problem:

• What is happening, according to the Windows event log, is that DWM.exe is crashing. The application event log shows two messages in sequence: error event 9020, "The Desktop Window Manager has encountered a fatal error (0x8898009b)", and info event 9009, "The Desktop Window Manager has exited with code (0x8898009b)".
• The flickering seems to get worse as system load increases.
• The problem only appears when the VM is configured with more than one VCPU.
• No combination of 2D/3D video settings, enabled or disabled, seems to help.
• Using the guest additions seemed to make the problem worse.
• I'm now trying out setting the power management parameters to "high performance", but have already seen flickering with this change also.

Has anyone found a decent workaround for this issue, other than using only one VCPU?

[jglogan]

The only thing I could find about the HRESULT 0x8898009b yielded this:

QueryPerformanceCounter returned a time in the past. MILERR_QPC_TIME_WENT_BACKWARD

I'd never tried this before, but am doing so now - disabling time sync between host and guest using:

VBoxManage setextradata vmname VBoxInternal/Devices/VMMDev/0/Config/GetHostTimeDisabled 1

Fingers crossed...

[jglogan]

This actually seems to have helped. I haven't seen any flickering since the change; usually I see something every 10 minutes or so.

[jglogan]

Yesterday, it worked flawlessly.

Today, it's back to the same behavior. I've verified that the setting is still in place, but I now see flickering every 5-10 min again. Bummer.

[llyzs]

I have the same issue and turning on HPET seems to help:

vboxmanage modifyvm <vm> --hpet on

I can't be very sure because the behavior is a bit unpredictable. Please report back how it works for you.

EDIT: in the guest, try also run this as administrator

bcdedit /set useplatformclock true

[jglogan]

Thanks! I haven't tried that. I'll set it up now and see how it goes.

[jglogan]

I'm running my third day with your suggested change (both the host-side Vbox setting and the guest-side Windows setting) and I've yet to see a glitch.

I'll keep an eye on things but it looks like this fixed the issue. Thanks again!