Severe random screen corruption on Mac Pro

[timothyn]

Hi,

I've been using VirtualBox for a year or 2 now and love it.

Presently, I'm running VBox to host a Windows 7 Pro x32 guest on my Mac Pro (8 core Nehalem late 2010 model). The host machine is equipped with two VGA cards and I have VirtualBox-4.1.16 installed. I was running VirtualBox-4.1.18 but had to roll back because of an unrelated problem in Windows 7.

Ever since the program has been installed on the Mac Pro (both versions and even when VBox is not running), I get random and very severe screen corruption across all three screens - sometimes only the first two on card 1, sometimes only on screen three (second card) and sometimes on all three screens at once.

It makes the screen(s) unreadable and it's not something that any particular action will fix (like activating/deactivating the screen saver or display sleep etc). I've tried removing and re-ordering and re-seating my RAM cards and my VGA cards to no avail. Apart from having to roll back to 4.1.6, VBox is/was up to date with the guest additions and host extensions loaded.

I've attached a screen shot taken with my phone to give you an idea of what I'm looking at. Tonight's instance occurred after about an hour and a half of hassle-free VBox operation. After I shut down Win7 and VBox, the issue remained.

So, the question is: has anyone else had this problem on a Mac of any sort (or any other host for that matter) and how did you solve it? Or is this an coincidental Mac OS X issue - I'm no great fanboy of OS X so will cop it sweet if it is an OS X problem but some evidence to that fact would be appreciated.

Cheers.

Tim.

[Perryg]

Did you also roll back the guest additions?

[timothyn]

Hi Perryg,

I did, but as per the original post, even with VBox not running at all, I still get corruption in OS X. Given the layer(s) between W7 (in this instance) and OS X, could the version of Guest Additions have a bearing?

Tim.

[Perryg]

Only if you installed the guest additions in the host by mistake. Other wise if VirtualBox guest is not running you will not see any difference.

I believe it is time to investigate the issue on the Mac.

[tshark]

I may be experiencing something similar.

VirtualBox 4.1.18 r78361, with Guest additions
Host: Mac Pro 15" Retina, OS 10.7.4
Guest: Win7 Pro 64-bit

Behavior: A window in the guest fails to refresh after an event. Or sometimes when using alt-tab to switch back to a window (it leaves the "ghost" of the other app over top of the new window).

It seems to happen most often in IE9, but that's probably because I do web application testing in IE9 in that VM. I have rarely, if ever, experienced this with Firefox (which I am also testing in that VM), however, or any other shell windows (such as CMD or Bash consoles).