[Solved] Not opening GUI properly during autostart of VirtualBox

[KylBak]

Hello! I'm new to VirtualBox (and VMs in general) and found it fairly easy to configure what I needed. I'm running Windows XP inside a desktop WIndows 10 Enterprise host machine. Everything works great except for my configuration to autostart VirtualBox.

I used Windows Task Scheduler to start "virtualboxvm.exe" at user login. Windows is starting the VM, but the user interface "screen" of Windows XP does not open. Inside VirtualBox manager, I can see that the VM is running in the preview window. The green "Show" arrow does not respond when clicking on it either. Maybe unrelated, but after forcing the VM closed and re-opening manually, my screen is not resizing correctly. I have to uncheck "auto-resize guest display" and recheck it to make it work.

Even more strange is if I shut down the VM, it works perfectly doing it manually from the command prompt. Typing the exact same commands that are being run by the Task Scheduler.

It's getting frustrating especially as this all worked correctly on a different "test" machine (Windows 10 Pro host on a laptop).

Just had a thought...could my issue be related to the desktop vs laptop? Still strange though because of how it works correctly through the command prompt.

Any advice/help/suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Kyle

[mpack]

VirtualBox needs a lot of resource stuff to be in place, so I think you probably just need to configure a delay.

[KylBak]

Funny you should mention that. Several hours after I posted, I tried just that. A 1 minute delay worked. Then I tried 30 seconds; it also worked. The I set it back to no delay; and it still worked. Several test restarts with no delay and it worked every time. I think I'll set it to 30 seconds just to be sure. Thank you!

Kyle

[mpack]

Good, I'll mark the topic as solved.