virtualbox.org

I use virtualbox a lot, and linux is my favorite, but every time I shutdown any linux distro, it dumps junk characters on my screen, like windows 95 did before it was stable. Every time I boot up ubuntu on my vbox, it says I need to upgrade my bios, does that mean the vbox bios, or the vbox itself, the version of ubuntu is 10.10

If the VM closes normally, then there is nothing to worry about. What you see is some bugs in the display of the distro. It reverts to basic VESA display and that isn't capable of showing that fancy splash screen. The weird symbols is the result of that.