State Busy - USB scanner and modem - unavailable in guest XP

[lawlist]

The HP usb scanner (HP Scanjet 8290) and extermal modem (Apple USB Motorola) both are listed in black (rather than grey) on the bottom window of the guest XP Professional installation, however, on mouse-over the state reflects that each are busy and when trying to select either one after the guest is up and running, an error message reflects that someone else is using those resources. Everything else seems to be working just fine, except the ability to send and receive faxes, and scan documents using my HP Scanjet 8290. I have tried enabling and disabling the USB options and com/port options in the machine settings, but that does not change whether or not the items (scanner or modem) are busy. The usb Apple Motorola modem works fine in a bootcamp xp native installation, and it also works fine in the OS X operating system, and it also works fine in a Vista 64 bit native installation -- bootcamp provides drivers for the Apple USB external modem. However, the HP Scanjet 8290 appears to only have drivers for Windows and not an intel-based Mac -- I have the new Mac Pro with the 2.93 dual intel nehalem processors. Is my issue something (i.e., a fix) that would need to be added to future versions of virtualbox, or is this something that might work at this time by changing some settings somewhere? Thanks.

[vbox4me2]

Create an empty USB filter, unplug device, make VM the focus(click on it) plugin device, VB will install a driver, unplug device, make VM the focus(click on it) plugin device, Guest should now pick it up.

[lawlist]

Please correct me if I am wrong. It appears that the usb filters that are visible in the virtual machine when I press the plus sign are there just to tease me and I should not select them even though they appear to have the right names -- i.e., scanner, modem, usb flash drive, etc. Instead of selecting the obvious choices that have what appear to be the correct names, I should instead ignore them and just create a new filter for each device desired without typing any specific information. Then by doing the plug / unplug dance with usb cables, the devices will magically become available in the guest xp. The usb Apple motorla modem is a soft modem that requires software installation from the bootcamp CD (which I installed), however, the modem causes the guest XP to slow down to a near halt -- XP is not frozen, but it is so slow it might as well be frozen (deselecting the modem availability at the bottom of the xp guest immediately unfreezes the guest xp). Am I the only person who likes to fax (send and receive) documents using Windows fax utility? Any ideas would be appreciated.

[lawlist]

The usb Apple Motorla external modem is able to be recognized by the guest box when the user has added a "blank" filter to the usb machine virtualbox, and then starting the xp guest, and then unplugging and plugging back in the usb modem while the guest xp is running. However, the modem causes the xp guest to slow down and essentially freeze as a practical matter -- disconnecting the modem from the usb options at the bottom of the guest box restores the xp guest to its regular functioning. I believe a similar issue was experienced by others in the past with different virtual machines (i.e., parallels). Here is a link to a problem that existed in 2007 -- it appears that virtualbox may need some similar development -- it is unknown whether parallels has fixed the issue:

http://forum.parallels.com/printthread.php?t=11201

[vbox4me2]

What you describe is how it should work, the problem is this doesn't always work as advertised, thats where the plugdance is coming from. Maybe 2.2 will have these issues solved. Once you get a device running for the Guest and the Guest slows down as you mentioned then you first need to find out whats eating cpu, maybe the software using the device needs updating, maybe it is constantly accessing the usb device... etc... after that you do a google, ea. "<softwarepackagename> windows slow" usually gives enough info to figure out a solution.

[saurabhg9]

I had a similar problem for my USB scanner.

This is what finally worked (after doing lots of tinkering around)

The key is to modify the USB settings of the VM as follows (also check screenshot below) -

1) In the USB settings, remove the checkmark against the "Enable USB 2.0 (EHCI) Controller" property.
2) Also then add a USB filter to the VM and set the "Remote" property to "Any".

After this scanning will work through the VM. Just make sure that you first start the VM and then connect the printer to the host.

All the best !
/Saurabh