Clock Drift after inserting USB device

[weller99]

Clock drift seems to be a common issue with vbox, and in another thread, i thought I had figured out how to make it work perfectly, but this drift that I'm seeing now seems to be specific to USB devices. I'm running virtualbox 3.2.6 with ubuntu 10.04 64-bit host and Windows XP 32-bit guest.

Previously, I said this can help solve the drift problem:
-disable "windows time" in services.msc
-enable virtualbox guest services in services.msc
-enable HostTime in virtualbox (I think this was default already):
VBoxManage setextradata "VIRTUALBOX_IMAGE_NAME" “VBoxInternal/Devices/VMMDev/0/Config/SetHostTimeDisabled” 0
-set the frequency to auto (I put a manual value in there, thinking it would work):
VBoxManage setextradata "VIRTUALBOX_IMAGE_NAME" "VBoxInternal/TM/TSCTicksPerSecond"
-put CPU in performance mode. (in my case, to keep it at 3.4GHz).

The problem came back when I insert USB devices such as my garmin USB watch, or my external 500GB drive which takes up 2 USB ports. I have my etoken USB stick in there permanently, and I found that when I boot my system up, 50% of the time, the clock drift is immediately present (quickly measured by double-clicking the time in the tray and checking to see if the seconds are ticking super slow) and once I see these errors in the logs, it's a lost cause:
VBox.log.1:00:02:21.468 TM: Giving up catch-up attempt at a 60 000 688 891 ns lag; new total: 60 000 688 891 ns
There is no further clue in the VBox logs. If I watch the windows time tick while I'm tailing the log, when it slows down after USB device insertion (or 50% of the time when I boot up with the etoken already inserted), the clock will all of a sudden slow down to 1/5 of normal speed but not right away, and nothing will be logged for 1 minute, when we get that catch-up attempt warning. Something seems to trigger the instant clock slow down from 1x to 0.2x. I wonder if there's a way to tell it to go back to 1x. I'd be happy with a workaround like a cronjob to set it to the right speed every minute, but the only way i can seem to recover from this is to reboot windows ;(

The other 50% of the time I boot up with my etoken, it works perfectly fine and can stay sync'd for 7 days. So, I think it's USB related, but I'm not sure how to troubleshoot this further. If I had to guess, it's almost as if inserting a USB device is like a gamble. I cross my fingers when I do it. If the clock doesn't slow down within a minute, you're good. If it slows down, you're screwed and have to reboot to correct the problem.

Please tell me I'm not alone with this problem. It's been bugging me for 4 months now ;( I promptly update my virtualbox after each version, hoping for a fix. I'm not sure if the solution should be on the host-side.
Any ideas?

[weller99]

here's an update.

I was wrong. It was not the USB devices that was causing the problem. I falsely correlated it to USB devices because that's when I noticed the time would go off.

I found the culprit. When I disabled UltraVNC server in services.msc, my clock drift problem went away!!!