You wrote SP3, so I guess you are meaning XP-SP3. The same happened to my W2K-SP4-installation, after I had installed the 2.02's guestadditions.
The problem is caused by the actual guest additions and already has been reported several times. If you have a backup of the vdi without installed guestadditions try this with an earlier version of the guestaddition, i.g. vs 1.66.
I'm sure the virtualbox-staff is working on this problem.
Though I'm not Stefan I will try to answer your questions.
In Windows in Applicationsgroup (? Programme in german) you will find an entry "Sun xVM VirtualBox Guest Additions" and under that a link "Uninstall".
If your windows doesn't starts any more you should boot into Safe Mode.
You should try to install the newer guestadditions from the virtualboxversion 2.04 which is avalable now for download. As you can read in the changelog the error you described now should be fixed.
It is allways a good idea to copy the vdi to a safe place after one has installed windows, so if something runs wrong one has a working version at hand. And it's also easy, because it is only one file seen from the mac point of view.
The GA Stefan mentioned stands for GuestAdditions. It's an abbreviation often used in this forum.
Hi Claas,
because this is the international forum I will continue to "radebrech" in english. There is a german forum as well.
Because I use W2K (Windows2000) I'm not able to reproduce the error you described.
In the changelog I read something about "[...] crash when accessing deep directory structures in a shared folder", maybe you should try another shared folder. Maybe in the sharedfolder name is a letter that can't be displayed by the mac.
Then I would check devicemanager for any not recognized devices, after that I would try older guestadditions. Somewhere here in the forum is a post in which the place is listed where you can download older virtualbox-versions. If you search the forum for "guestaddition old version" you might find it. After that I would fiddle with the vm's enhanced properties, ACPI, APIC and so on.
And I would try to make the error reproduceable, this might not help you but the developers.
If this all does not work I would try one of the commercial available virtualisers, like Parallels or Vmware. You can download a time-limited demoversion and try them before you buy them. If your error also occurs with them, it's not a problem with virtualbox, but with your windows, your mac, the connected devices or your network.
For me 2.04 works, with shared folders, but they have a flat structure, that means the mountpoint is not something like "//virtualboxshardfolder/dir1/dir2/[...]dirN". The only thing that for me still does not work is USB2.
I have the same problem with Win2K running within VB. I never saw this as a problem because I guessed it was the same effect as on one of my computers which refuses to completely shutdown. I feel that the system is down really but lacks some "last step" to tell it has finished execution.
I just switch the machine off after it's down. Works very fine.
This has been happening to me when I restart Windows because of an update from MS. The only way I get back to Windows (XP) is by closing VB and restarting Windows from there. I don't know why this started happening and if there is a better solution.
