virtualbox.org

Ever since I updated to VB version 6.1.16 r140961 (Qt5.6.2) I can't use the "Optical Drives" menu (or right click on the optical drive icon at the bottom) without crashing the VM I'm using at the time.
As soon as I boot up the virtual machine and I try to open the Optical Drives menu, the VM freezes for about 5-10 seconds then throws an application error about not being able to read some memory and that's it.

What I noticed that the issue doesn't happen until the guest os starts booting. As soon as the OS boots the "Optical Drives" menu becomes unresponsive, hovering over it freezes the VM then it crashes

Host OS: Windows 10 20H2 build 19042.630
Guest OS: Ubuntu 20.04, Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows 10 and a DOS vm for old games.

All machines seem to be crashing with this type of errors:

...
!!! rtR3WinUnhandledXcptFilter caught an exception on thread 00000000000043b0!!!
...
00:00:31.055340 ExceptionCode=0xc0000005 ExceptionFlags=0x00000000 ExceptionAddress=00000000549b8a90
00:00:31.055346 ExceptionInformation[0]=0000000000000000
00:00:31.055349 ExceptionInformation[1]=0000000000000008
...
00:00:31.057085 Thread ID: 0000000000000c44
00:00:31.057090 Thread name: main
00:00:31.057093 Thread IPRT: 0000000001428910
...

What I tried:
Reinstalling the Additions within each virtual machine
Reinstalling VBox
Creating some fresh VMs

I attached some logs

FWIW, I remember an investigation of a similar problem in Mouse Hover on Devices Sub Menu crash, unfortunately without a result.

After reading the thread you mentioned I moved the .VirtualBox directory from C:\Users\[username] and that fixed the issue for any new test vm's I created afterwards.

Then I began importing back the old VM's and the issue started appearing again.

What I did next was this:
- imported back all my old machines then went through all of them, deleting all snapshots and unmounting (removing) any iso file that was attached to them
- went to the Virtual Media Manager and removed all optical media files
- closed all virtualbox windows (vms and main interface) then i killed all VB processes from the task manager
- I deleted the C:\Users\username\.VirtualBox directory again, then I stared VB, imported all my old machines

This seems to have fixed my issues.

After looking through the old backup files I noticed that there were some references to some iso files that used to be stored on a network drive that's no longer available
In C:\Users\username\.VirtualBox the "RecentFolderCD" and "RecentListCD" were pointing to that network drive
The .vbox files which contain the settings for each VM also contained some references to that network drive within the DVDImages->Image keys
Something like this (I:\ was that network drive's mapping):
I think that trying to look for those files on that network drive and timing out is what was causing the issue.

Thank you for reporting back with your valuable insights. I'll be happy to use them next time.