Host WinXP: VBox installation breaks host network

[rivendale]

Read through and searched to find similar and haven't found any that apply:
Running WinXP and had an old Vbox (1.5.6 or so) that worked "fine". For some reason I decided to upgrade to the latest, which happened to be 4.1.8. After installation I have no network: No network adapters installed.

I opened the Intel PROSet troubleshooter which reports "Wireless Hardware is not bound to transport driver".
(device manager reports for the adapter: Device is working properly and is enabled.)

Attempt to start VBox results in an error: "COM object for VB could not be created"

Also, Windows reports new hardware (net) to be installed and finds no driver.

Tried to uninstall VBox, but no effect, network adapter is still unavailable. (same error as above)
Tried to reinstall VBox, still same effect.
Uninstalled it again, and still without network. :- ((
And what about this "net" adapter that keeps coming up?? (unknown device in device manager)

What did I miss? I've read manual up and down more times than I can count on my fingers now...
Where to start looking? Reinstalling Windows is at this moment not an option.

For now, Disabled VBox host interfaces and the unknown net device...

Thank you for help, ideas, points, anything...

[TechGoudy]

Have you tried updating the network drivers?

[rivendale]

Yes, all drivers are up to date.

After having removed VBox I had to reinstall the network drivers for wireless network. The rest (wired ethernet) seems to have worked all the time. Haven't tried BT-, usb-, etc-networks, but read another post regarding an upgrade to 4.0.6 that didn't have wireless network after upgrade. This seems the same.

So, what happens when installing VBox is that the wireless network is completely removed from the system, not the helper and status programs, but the drivers. Which Do explains why there is no adapter bound to transport driver. There is no one!

So the question remaining is; why is the wireless driver removed at the VBox installation?

[naemrr]

it is not so much at installation as it is at UPGRADE, a good rule of thumb is, if your virtualbox is more then 2 versions older then what your about to install, fully uninstall the old one first, then install the new one fresh.

driver and system file confusions are common when making such a large leap with any software package, thus it is always a good idea to give the new version a fresh start on the system by giving its older brother a swift boot.


also be prepared to have to make new virtual machines for your virtual computers, as the old virtualbox settings files may not translate well across that gap, the drive images should make it just fine, but backups prevent stress and tears.

"Attempt to start VBox results in an error: "COM object for VB could not be created"" could be related to this fact, OR possibly a bug of 4.1.10 that from what i can see is not yet on the bug tracker, logs of the crash could help the devs determine the root cause alot faster