Windows shutdown: VBoxSVC.exe does not terminate

[Flint]

Hi everybody

After researching in this forum, the bugtracker and Google I've decided to open this topic. I was unable to find a working solution with the search results. I will drop some possibly related discussions in a separate post tomorrow due to the restriction to new users.

I have troubles to get VBoxSVC.exe automatically closed when I try to shutdown or restart Windows 10 (x64, 16GB Memory). On the shutdown screen, a message appears "VirtualBox Interface has active connections" which prevents Windows from shutting down. In the Task manager, VBoxSVC.exe is still loaded. When I terminate this process, shutdown works.

The issue appears on my machine in connection with the BOINC Grid Computing client (LHC@home project) which uses virtual machines in headless mode in the background. Guest Addons are used. BOINC does not start any VB GUI. When BOINC stops calculation, all running Virtual Machines are sent into "Saved" status. VirtualBox incl. Extension Pack 5.1.22r115126 is installed.

However, I tried to reproduce the issue without running BOINC projects on Virtual Box on a freshly installed Windows 10. I found out that Windows shutdown does generally not work when the GUI (VirtualBox.exe) is still open while restarting Windows 10. To get Windows restarting I need to abort shutdown and kill first VBoxSVC.exe in the task manager. The VB GUI disappears by itself when I initiate Windows shutdown, just VBoxSVC.exe remains.

I can understand that VBoxSVC blocks shutdown when a Virtual Machine is still running. But in my tests all VMs were either in status "Powered off" or "Saved". I can't see any reason for VBoxSVC to stay loaded when I initiate shutdown / restart of Windows in this case. In the past (some weeks / months ago), shutdown worked fine.

I've saved some logs and attached them. The "boinc_...."-logs are VM logs, saved after suspending boinc computation / before shutting down Windows. VBoxSVC.log was taken after the shutdown. VBoxSVC_ShutdownWithOpenGUI.log was saved after tried to shutdown Windows with the open GUI.

How can I get Windows shutdown without killing VBoxSVC.exe manually?

Thank you in advance for any help and best wishes,
Alex

[mpack]

I suspect you have been moving or renaming VirtualBox folders incorrectly. Basically you must unregister the VM first before you do that.

00:02:02.814906 ERROR [COM]: aRC=VBOX_E_OBJECT_NOT_FOUND (0x80bb0001) aIID={0169423f-46b4-cde9-91af-1e9d5b6cd945} aComponent={VirtualBoxWrap} aText={Could not find a registered machine named 'boinc_0bb63ae77620ad7b'}, preserve=false aResultDetail=0

[socratis]

Mind you that VBoxSVC take more than 10 seconds to shut down after the last client has shut down. That is if everything is working as expected. If the host is busy with other important task, like shutting down the rest of the processes and there is heavy I/O, that number is expected to increase.

There are a lot of tickets open with "VBoxSVC" in the description. I'm pretty sure that I've seen one, not that long ago, that fits your description, I just don't have it handy now. Use the Advanced search in the bug tracker.