Vbox 5.0 disables host internet

[John M]

Been using vbox 4.3.30 for a while on Win 8.1 Pro host. Guests are old DOS, Win10 evaluation and Ubuntu. Everything runs well, no issues. Yesterday tried vbox 5.0. Win10 would not initialize due to USB 2.0 issue. Fixed that and continued a while before shutting down Win10 guest session. Discovered that internet sites were no longer available to host. Rebooting host system did not help. Could ping outside sites via both IP address and name but could not open them. No outside site would connect in Chrome or Firefox or IE or Windows Live Mail. Now here's what is most interesting - restarted Win10 guest session and then both host and guest internet access suddenly reappeared. Closed vbox session and internet connections disappeared again. Uninstalled vbox 5.0 and rebooted host but no help. Internet connections were still gone. Finally ran Windows System Restore to earlier point in time. Everything worked again. Reinstalled/repaired vbox 4.3.30 and no issues so far. Will definitely stay away from vbox 5.0 for a while longer.

[mpack]

Google for "MaxNumFilters".

[John M]

Thanks for the assistance. When I researched "MaxNumFilters", the postings which I found seemed to discuss a problem different from mine. I had no trouble seeing the bridged adapter. I simply lost internet connectivity on my Win8.1 Pro host whenever the vbox Win10 guest session was not active. The host could ping all of the external web sites but nothing (Chrome, Firefox, IE, Windows Mail) could actually connect to any site. But whenever the vbox Win10 guest session was active, the host could connect to any site OK. This situation occurred only on vbox 5.0. Version 4.3.30 had no problems.

Additionally, a registry search for "MaxNumFilters" came up empty on my Win8.1 host.

[mpack]

I'm not sure what "problems like yours" you were expecting to find. The MaxNumFilters issue is precisely that: there is a maximum depth to the driver stack on a network card (if no registry override is set, the default is 8). The effect is random: if 9 drivers are installed then whatever app was unlucky enough to require the preempted driver will fail. This could be VirtualBox, or it could be a host internet service.

You need to add the registry key, with a higher value such as 12. Details on Google as before.

I also suggest rebooting the host before trying again.