VB 7 and Windows 11 - graphical issues and more

[alex_ncfc]

Hi, I'm hoping someone can help me with this.

I use VirtualBox mainly for checking out Windows Dev builds in the insider programme, and until now it has always worked pretty well.

I updated to VirtualBox 7 yesterday, but soon realised, that the graphics are messed up. Unfortunately I didn't take a screenshot, but it looked like a lot of the transparency in my Windows 11 guest was broken, and another example, the edges of the start menu looked broken too. This was with and without the VB 7 Additions installed (I had thought updating the Additions would fix this)

So anyway, I uninstalled version 7 and went straight back to reinstalling 6.1.38. My Windows 11 Guest boots and the graphics are back to normal (with the 6.1.38 additions installed again) but I have lost activation of my 11 guest. It previously worked by a license attached to my Microsoft account, but when I click "Activate" it says it the Activation Status is "Not active" - going to Troubleshoot and selecting, "I have recently changed my hardware on this device" just says it cannot re-activate at this time:

Activation box

act.jpg (73.16 KiB) Viewed 13139 times

So I guess two things - does anyone else have graphical issues when running Win11 under the new release of VB7? And also, how can I get my 11 guest to reactivate?

Many thanks!

[nxprx]

does anyone else have graphical issues when running Win11 under the new release of VB7

Yes. Transparent glitches everywhere (start menu, buttons, taskbar context menus, etc), even with Transparency disabled in Windows settings. Disabling 3D Acceleration in the VBox display settings fixed them, but now everything works for about a minute or two, then the whole screen freezes and nothing short of a hard reset works.

So now I gotta choose between extremely annoying display glitches, or random freezes. And thanks to you, I'm too afraid to downgrade to v6.

Edit: Looking at the beta subforum, the display glitches seem to have persisted through v7 betas 1,2,3, and now Final.

[scottgus1]

thanks to you, I'm too afraid to downgrade to v6.

uninstalled version 7 and went straight back to reinstalling 6.1.38. My Windows 11 Guest boots and the graphics are back to normal (with the 6.1.38 additions installed again) but I have lost activation of my 11 guest.

Proper host and VM backups (disk images, file copies, etc.) would allow recovery from any such glitches. Simply copy the un-7.0-processed VM back from your backups & you'll be up and running again. Or did that horse get out of the barn before the door was locked?

the display glitches seem to have persisted through v7 betas 1,2,3, and now Final.

7.0.0 should be considered buggy yet, almost still beta-ish, and still only for testing. Wait until several more even-number releases before many bugs will be caught. I'd keep my production hosts that must stay running on 6.1 for a while yet.

[alex_ncfc]

does anyone else have graphical issues when running Win11 under the new release of VB7

Yes. Transparent glitches everywhere (start menu, buttons, taskbar context menus, etc), even with Transparency disabled in Windows settings. Disabling 3D Acceleration in the VBox display settings fixed them, but now everything works for about a minute or two, then the whole screen freezes and nothing short of a hard reset works.

So now I gotta choose between extremely annoying display glitches, or random freezes. And thanks to you, I'm too afraid to downgrade to v6.

Thanks very much for confirming that it isn't just me who had these issues when using Windows 11 on the new version 7 of VB. It looked a complete mess, there were even buttons not showing in settings, and also my account display picture didn't show either. Can I just ask, what is your host GPU? I'm still running a Geforce 660 Ti w/2GB RAM and I'm not sure if this is anything to do with it, as I noted that the new VB 7 comes with DX11 improvements, although I'm sure my graphics card is fully DX11 compatible.

thanks to you, I'm too afraid to downgrade to v6.

uninstalled version 7 and went straight back to reinstalling 6.1.38. My Windows 11 Guest boots and the graphics are back to normal (with the 6.1.38 additions installed again) but I have lost activation of my 11 guest.

Proper host and VM backups (disk images, file copies, etc.) would allow recovery from any such glitches. Simply copy the un-7.0-processed VM back from your backups & you'll be up and running again. Or did that horse get out of the barn before the door was locked?

Sadly you're correct, I messed up here by not making a backup of my VM before starting it in the new version of VirtualBox. I'm in a muddle as I can't remember how I activated it before (just to confirm it is fully legal!) because I'm sure it just activated automatically when I logged into my MS account when setting up the OS. Oddly, I've tried putting in the OS activation key (which I previously extracted from the registry a long time ago when the VM was still working on VB 6.1.x for backup purposes) but it says the key isn't valid. Is this not the actual key? Because previously Windows said it was activated by a digital license on my Microsoft account.

Another thing is the VM itself has slowed down massively since I ran it in 7.0 and trying to run it again in 6.1.38. I do have an erroneous entry in Device Manager now, "Microsoft Hyper-V Virtual Machine Bus Provider
" which reads as the status: "Windows cannot initialise the device driver for this hardware." I'm guessing this was something that was added when booting with version 7, and is now missing because I am back on version 6.1. I'm not sure what has screwed up my activation status though.

[scottgus1]

You can ask Microsoft about how to reactivate the VM, they ought to be able to tell you how to do it.

Virtualbox puts a "machine UUID" that the VM OS sees, which is part of the activation process. Don't delete the whole VM, or you'll lose this UUID and a different VM OS's activation will complain about needing a new license. But if you do a complete fresh reinstall of 11 in the old VM it should see the old UUID and reactivate. You could also switch the hard drive file out of the VM and put in a new drive file and install 11 on that. The VM should activate with the old product code and license, because it's still the same old VM with a new drive. Windows allows change of a hard drive & fresh install with the old license.

Ultimately you may have to call MS and ask them for help.

[alex_ncfc]

You can ask Microsoft about how to reactivate the VM, they ought to be able to tell you how to do it.

Virtualbox puts a "machine UUID" that the VM OS sees, which is part of the activation process. Don't delete the whole VM, or you'll lose this UUID and a different VM OS's activation will complain about needing a new license. But if you do a complete fresh reinstall of 11 in the old VM it should see the old UUID and reactivate. You could also switch the hard drive file out of the VM and put in a new drive file and install 11 on that. The VM should activate with the old product code and license, because it's still the same old VM with a new drive. Windows allows change of a hard drive & fresh install with the old license.

Ultimately you may have to call MS and ask them for help.

You solved it! Thanks.

Basically I forgot to mention as I didn't think it was relevant, but I set up a new VM using the existing Windows 11 hard disk image - this is because when I tried starting the VM when reverting back to 6.1 from version 7, there was nothing but a black screen - no UEFI BIOS display, nothing. So to get around that, I had just created a new Windows 11 based VM entry, using the existing disk image file. I had no idea about the UUID stuff. Thankfully, I hadn't deleted the previous, non-working (black screen) VM - I'd just renamed it Windows 11 Old. So I've just made a clone of it, and made sure to use existing UUIDs, and now Windows says it's active again without me having to even go into the activation screen.

Thanks again!

[Air Force One]

Funny enough, it works without any glitches with GA from 7.0 in the VBox 6.1.40.

[nxprx]

Can I just ask, what is your host GPU? I'm still running a Geforce 660 Ti w/2GB RAM and I'm not sure if this is anything to do with it

It's a laptop with an NVIDIA T2000 Mobile 4GB. Other than both being NVIDIA, they seem far enough on the spectrum from each other to be the root cause =)

[Vpupkin-3]

Same graphical issues on Win10 Guest.

[eebssk1]

Funny enough, it works without any glitches with GA from 7.0 in the VBox 6.1.40.

No glitches with transparent on?
Anyway the 3d accel performance is still worse on 6.1 than 7.0

[mpack]

Funny enough, it works without any glitches with GA from 7.0 in the VBox 6.1.40.

Transparency effects in Windows 10 has caused problems in VirtualBox since around when Windows 10 first appeared. The usual advice is to disable transparency effects, and I don't really miss them: I don't think it's radically important to be able to dimly see another window through the current one.

[Obsession]

When using multiple monitors, there is the same error as it was at the beginning of VB 6. The mouse cursor is in a different position than the calculated click. So you can't use several monitors at all at the moment, because not a single click really hits the desired spot.

[nxprx]

The usual advice is to disable transparency effects, and I don't really miss them: I don't think it's radically important to be able to dimly see another window through the current one.

While I totally agree with your sentiment, it has been mentioned by the few people affected (in a few different threads since beta) that transparency was turned off in the OS when experiencing these glitches. I'm sure Win 11 is partially to blame for it, but also note that the same people reported v6 did not have this issue.

[scottgus1]

7.0 is just out of beta and will have bugs for some time. Test VMs under 7.0 should be reported here viewforum.php?f=1 in the Stickied "Discuss the 7.0.x Release" topics, where x is the final version number you're using. One problematic VM per post, with a zipped vbox.log posted through the forum's Upload Attachment tab, showing the failed run of the VM, please.

[IPGSupp]

Yes. Transparent glitches everywhere (start menu, buttons, taskbar context menus, etc), even with Transparency disabled in Windows settings. Disabling 3D Acceleration in the VBox display settings fixed them, but now everything works for about a minute or two, then the whole screen freezes and nothing short of a hard reset works

I see exactly this behavior with Windows 11 host and guest, and confirm the 3D acceleration or freeze choice.

It's 22H2 which is not yet on the supported list. Just moving the mouse around in the VM causes the screen to redraw in some apps. Transparency turned off everywhere, but windows and menus remain transparent, some to the point of unusable.

(Host Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Super)