Windows host freezes if VB is open and any USB device is plugged in

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anastrophe
Posts: 1
Joined: 18. Feb 2024, 01:53

Windows host freezes if VB is open and any USB device is plugged in

Post by anastrophe »

I'm at my wit's end. I've used VB for years and years. I have only a few guest OSes, the most often used a Debian guest - though, the guest is irrelevant to the problem. At some point in the last few months, VB has become unusable for me, because I cannot plug in any USB devices while VB is running. Which is to say that if the VB application is open - just open, no guests running or anything - and I plug in a usb device, within about two seconds my PC freezes up completely. No mouse movement, the desktop clock stops ticking, the machine is unusable. The disk activity indicator on the PC itself shows some activity while in this state, but that's it. I have to hit the reset button on the PC to restart. I've tried waiting for a long time to see if it would eventually unfreeze - in this case, 'a long while' being five minutes. Just stays locked up.

I've read the few other threads that describe similar but not identical behavior. I've uninstalled and reinstalled several times, even uninstalling using Revo Uninstaller to remove all traces of it in the registry and on disk (while leaving the guest disks behind of course).

The really peculiar part is that - if I have a USB device plugged in before starting VB, then start VB, if I remove the device - the same freeze occurs. One might think that might be a 'solution' - plug in the USB device I need to use, run VB, then access the device that's already plugged in - but no. Once I select it in the device menu, poof, that's it. At all other times, all of my USB devices work without issue, only when VB is running does this happen. Heck, it even happens when plugging in/unplugging my Trezor crypto wallet.

Any thoughts? I've looked at what logs VB seems to generate, but there's nothing that stands out (partly because the logs are very long, and I don't have the patience to scroll through 5000 lines of logging). If there are certain keywords that I should look for, maybe that would help. But in all other respects, I'm at a dead end. No other application on my PC does this.

Windows 10 Pro 22H2
AMD Ryzen 9 5950x
64GB ram
Samsung 990 Pro
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