Third Party Apps Not Working

[Jamesinator]

Hello all, I have been using VirtualBox for a little while now, and everything seems to be going well. In my spare time, I like to analyse malware and people's programs. I have set up a virtual machine with a specific goal: to reverse-engineer programs and understand their functionality. However, I've encountered an issue. When I install a program that I intend to analyse and try to run it, it simply does not open. This is very strange to me because I'm confident that if I were to do the same on my main PC, I wouldn't encounter any problems.

This problem primarily occurs with certain applications, namely malware and similar software, or programs that aren't commonly downloaded by others. Two specific errors consistently appear every time I attempt to run the program I'm currently analyzing:

1. "vcruntime140.dll was not found"
2. "MSVCP140.dll was not found"

I want to clarify that these errors are not my problem, but are here incase they might be affecting anything. To fix this i install the Visual Studio Redistributable C++ 2015 package. I install both the x64 and x86 packages, even though my machine is x64 just in case. After installing these packages, the errors related to missing .dll files disappear. However, a new problem arises: when I try to run the program, instead of seeing the missing .dll error messages, the program loads for a brief moment and then simply fails to run. Here's what happens in detail: I double-click the program, a blue loading circle appears alongside my cursor, the circle vanishes, and then nothing happens.

I have faced a similar issue a few times before on other computers, though it was never within a virtual machine. In those cases, disabling my antivirus software fixed the problem. However, in this case, that doesn't seem to make any difference. If anyone has any ideas or wants any additional information, please let me know. Thanks!

[mpack]

VirtualBox is a hardware simulator. It has no control over what software runs and doesn't run in Windows.

And the error messages seem self-explanatory: the app expects system DLLs that have not been installed, it looks like Microsoft C runtimes. I suggest a Google search to find fixes for Windows problems like that.

Topic moved from Windows Hosts to Windows Guests forum, since the host is not relevant to the question asked.

[fth0]

If a malware has decent quality, it recognizes if it's being run inside a debugger or inside a VM, and refuses to run then.