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Having terrible performance on an XP guest under a Win7 host. 100% cpu on the XP guest almost all the time. Problematic processes are "SYSTEM" and any browser (Firefox, Seamonkey, IE) routinely is using >50% cpu. Thats all thats installed is a browser.

The odd thing is that when I first installed virtualbox and setup an XP guest the performance was great and amazing really I had dozens of browser windows/tabs open and snappy as hell. no complaints then. After I had done my original rough draft installation I wiped the disks and reinstalled the win7 host from scratch and loaded virtualbox with the xp guest, but now inexplicably its unusable and I was vigilant to keep the same settings as the first dry run that worked so well. I feel like its gotta be something super simple?

Here is what I have

Win7 enterprise host 32bit
CPU does not support VT extensions
4GB of RAM
1 core that is hyperthreaded for 2 cpu threads

WinXP 32 bit guest - Guest Additions installed
1vcpu
512MB RAM
32MB video memory (also tried 128MB, no help)
No 2D/3D acceleration
IDE controller PIXX4 with host IO cache
C drive is a 6GB VDI
D Drive is an 8GB VDI
NIC=Paravirtualized (changed to this from default, no help either)
Audio disabled (tried disabling it, but no help)
IO Apic is NOT ENABLED

I'm really baffled and frustrated. See my logs below, please let me know how to make this xp guest a dream again instead of this unusable nightmare

I don't see anything obviously wrong in the log. I would unmount the guest additions ISO, and I might try giving the VM a bit more memory. Other than that I suspect network driver problems on the host - perhaps you should look for driver updates there.

Well, I tried unmounting the guest additions iso, and I tried updating the NIC driver...no help

So next i figured XP must just have some wierd unknown performance issues with Virtualbox 4.2.0 and I blew it away and went with Win2003 server

Installed 2003 and WOW...fast as hell. So fast I can't even tell its a VM...It has two VDI's, one for OS and one for DATA.

Then I decide I want to move my VDI's to different partitions on my host hard drives. I dismount the VDI's from the VM, copy them over, and then remount them. VM starts up and the perfomance is just SUCK again like XP was...what the heck?

Is there some bad juju with movinf VDI's? Everything is slow on this VM now. Even the Video repaoint is slow. Just going from the starting windows/win2003 screen I can watch it repaint video as if I was using a 2MB video card on a Pentium 2 or something.

The only other thing i did besides move VDI's is do a snapshot and then restore it

What is going on with this? Any ideas? I can be the only person to experience this?

Provided you moved the VM properly (and it would break if you didn't, not just run slower), then no - there is nothing in VirtualBox that would make the VM run slower just because you moved a VDI. If I was you I would now be checking the performance of that disk partition you moved the VDIs to.

Incidentally, it is better to move entire VM folders, rather than locating VDIs outside the VM folder - for neatness and for compatibility with future tools, not for performance.