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....when accessing windows Explorer after installing 6.1.18 w/ guest additions for WinXP VM Guest. Everything else appears to be working fine. Yes; I rebooted the XP VM. Just an observation.

Just need to verify if anyone else gets this lag when they open Windows Explorer and then try to go to another subdirectory. If not, then maybe the next update will re-jigger something and get me back to normal. Again, it doesn't appear to affect browsing (mainly use XP VM as a sandbox for browsing so I'm mostly unaffected; just an annoyance).

Sounds like normal lag when an XP guest was installed on a single vCPU. All Windows editions do a lot of searching and indexing immediately after installation. If you are on one core it lags, and it did so on physical PCs too. Unfortunately, changing from a single core HAL to multi is not easy on XP. It won't adjust automatically unless it happens to already be on multi.

This behavior did not happen until 6.1.18, mpack. I do know how to enable duel processors in XP but that slows the VM further (but I've not tested it in 6.1.18, but I suspect the same behavior will be the case since most of the previous versions of Virtualbox caused XP to slow down when enabling dual processors).

For the curious, open a cmd prompt and run the line below; will require 2 reboots and you'll then have 2 processors in XP (only way to revert that I know of is to recover back to my golden set point):

rundll32 syssetup,SetupInfObjectInstallAction ACPIAPIC_MP_HAL 128 %windir%\inf\hal.inf

Well, I just installed the 6.1.18 GAs into my XP VM and I am not seeing the lag you speak of. And since the GAs are mainly just drivers for shared folders and graphics, I can't even imagine the mechanism by which any of those drivers could interfere with Windows Explorer click response times. Slow Windows click responses are always IME a combination of (a) high I/O overhead for some reason, and (b) only having 1 core.

You should examine the XP Task Manager list, enable the CPU and I/O columns (network and disk) and see exactly where the hogs are. You should look at the host too: maybe AV is being triggered by something.

p.s. I'm not sure that your HAL replacement strategy is complete, though it's encouraging to see that you are at least aware of the direction you need to be looking. It's been a while, but I believe that standard XP images don't (or don't always) offer a selection of HALs. You can count on them having one HAL that was selected from the CD when the OS was installed, period. Your solution seems to assume that multiple HALs are available for selection by a simple script, but AFAIK that only happens if you put those alternatives there. Or, it was not a standard XP install from a retail or OEM CD.

Definitely appreciate the replies, mpack. I did enable duel processors and definitely got the usual lag for doing so (so recovered from my golden set point. I then changed the folder settings so that if you double click a folder it launches another window. Now that changes instantaneously as should. It's only when I keep it in the the same explorer window that I get the lag. I suspect somehow my VM got some sort of corruption. It only affects Windows Explorer so not fretting about it at the moment. Will do some research on my own now since I'm pretty sure it's not Virtualbox 6.1.18x based on your input and now from changing the folder setting to launch another window. Not sure where to even begin since the search hits I got for this problem weren't the issue (doesn't address my problem that is), but I'll take this issue offline now since again, if I set the change director to launch another windows, it's fast.

Re increasing CPU count beyond 1 in XP: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=24823&start=15#p111502

I tried this HALu process in a SBS Server 2003 VM with 1 processor several years ago, worked perfectly, bumped to 4 processors.

scottgus1 wrote:Re increasing CPU count beyond 1 in XP: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=24823&start=15#p111502

I tried this HALu process in a SBS Server 2003 VM with 1 processor several years ago, worked perfectly, bumped to 4 processors.

Sorry for the delay; just don't check threads like I should. Again, I did increase to 2 processors, but in doing so, XP just noticeably slows down. Leaving single processor (even though dual processor support setup in the XP hardware configuration) gives me the best performance for my XP VM. Just wish I can figure out why changing directories within Windows Explorer causes the long delay; pretty frustrating but to be honest, I only occasionally need to even use Windows Explorer in my XP VM.

lylejk wrote:....when accessing windows Explorer after installing 6.1.18 w/ guest additions for WinXP VM Guest. Everything else appears to be working fine. Yes; I rebooted the XP VM. Just an observation.

I am running Vbox 6.1.18 under both Ubuntu 20.04 as host and Windows 7/10 on 2 different machines has host with Win 7 Ult and Win XP Pro guests. I recently updated to .18 and also noticed the slow response time with Explorer in Win XP running under Ubuntu host. It does not seem to happen the other way around with Windows as host.

I also run 2 CPUs on the XP guest, I will try it with only 1 to see if it improves.

I will also try opening in a new window vs the same window to see how the affects it.

It does not seem to affect the Win 7 guest.

I have another funky network shared folder permissions issue in the XP guest but will start another thread for that as I don't see one.