[solved] Steam closes when opening Help > System information

[o.dierick]

Software :
VirtualBox 4.3.28 r100309
Debian Wheezy 64bit linux host - Windows Vista 32bit guest
WDDM experimental driver is installed.
Steam is up-to-date.

Issue description:
When I click on System information in the Help menu of Steam, Steam closes without any error message.
Steam makes a dump file in its folder that is of no use to me, even with the debugging tools for windows, as nothing in that dump is meaningful to me.

Background informations:
Finality is playing the game "APB Reloaded" from GamersFirst in linux.
Current Wine has a bug/missing functionnality that prevents the game to start, due to the game internal web browser not loading.
The workaround is to start "APB Reloaded" from Windows, let the store load in the browser and opt-out for 24 hours, then starting the game from Wine.
My goal is NOT to play the game in the virtual machine, only load as far as the main menu, opt-out from the store then disconnect.

When I had a Windows partition, I could do this from native Windows.
I do not have a Windows partition anymore, so I thought I could use a Windows guest on VirtualBox for it.
At first I did not install the WDDM experimental driver and the game told me that my video card was unsupported.
Then I installed the WDDM driver and now the game crashes.
The log file from the game states that pixel shader model 3 is missing.
When I tried to open System Information in Steam to look at the device it identified, the issue occured.

I believe the issue is caused by a crash in the WDDM driver, but I'd rather have advice from people more knowledgeable.

[loukingjr]

You may have figured this out by now but here goes. Apparently even though you weren't trying to run the game, Steam looks for the pixel shader model 3. That's not part of the VirtualBox WDDM driver. It sounds like when you tried to open system info it caused an error condition in Steam.

At any rate, you can't do what you want to do in the VM.

[o.dierick]

I was able to start the game with a software shader emulation program (namely Transgaming swiftshader 3.0 demo).
It goes without saying that it is too slow to play, I did not even bother to try (1-2 FPS on the log-in screen), but at least it allowed me to load the store from the main menu.
After that I could start the game from Wine as intended.

The software shader emulation also avoids the crash in Steam when opening System Informations.