virtualbox.org

Pretty much every morning my VBox is running but the VBox GUI is 'dead', that is, none of the GUI buttons can be clicked and the mouse is not seen in the virtualbox. I can group select icons so the mouse is there but I can not see it.

The Keyboard does still transfer to the Virtual machine if the mouse is inside the vbox windows.

I can remote access to it or VNC to it. I can also use vboxmanage to send it an acpishutdown (or although I have not tried yet it should be able to suspend it, then hopefully the GUI will close and I can resume in a new GUI.

This has only started since an upgrade from 1.5 .2 to 2.0.2

Host: CentOS 5.2
Client: WinXP SP3
VirtualBox additions installed

Any ideas how to fix this or is it a bug?

To Clarify:

The part of the Gui is that which the virtual machine is viewed through. The control gui where you can start/stop and change settings of each virtual machine is not affected. and can still be used.

If you need any more info to be able to help just say.

Thanks,

I'm getting exactly the same problem with Virtualbox 2.0.2 on a clean install of Ubuntu 8.04. Approximately once a day the VirtualBox window stops responding to user input for several minutes although the virtual machine within it can still be seen to be running fine.

I haven't noticed this behaviour in earlier versions of VirtualBox, but I have been using it a lot more since upgrading to 2.0.2.

The other versions of VirtualBox that we have run all seemed very stable, this is the only one that we have had this issue with.

I couldn't find any bugs about this, so I've raised one now:
http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/2380

I think I may have a workaround for this. I'm getting tons of lockups now, but connecting to the hung machine over RDP seems to release it.

I'm running windows guests, and connecting directly to them. I haven't tested yet whether VirtualBox's RDP interface also works to un-freeze the UI.

We can RDP directly to the Windows guest but that does not free up the the VirtualBox UI.

You can only use the VRDP interface if you start the virtual machine in headless mode, I believe.

That's what I thought, but it looks like that changed in 2.0.2. There's an option to enable RDP and it works perfectly.

You are right, just tested. You can use the VRDP server when the virtual machine is started from the GUI rather than in Headless mode.

Unfortunately that does not help our gui come back to life.