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On OS X Mountain Lion, I can't seem to find a way to disable the dock preview icon. This results in very high CPU usage with just a couple VMs running.

I see the option to change the icon by right clicking and selecting dock icon -> Show Application Icon, however it does not toggle, the Monitor Preview stays checked, and the monitor preview remains the dock icon. Furthermore, this seems a pretty bad solution, as every VM boot I have to go change the icon. It would be really nice if there was a default I could set somewhere in virtual box itself to always disable the preview icon... Maybe that exists and I just can't find it?

Thanks for any pointers.

Sorry to reply to self, it seems that its an edge case with running VMs in full screen mode... If I exit full screen mode, then I can turn off the monitor preview mode, and then it appears to stay set for that VM which is good... even after changing back to full screen mode and through reboots/power off/power on...

Still a bit of an issue that the toggle doesn't appear to work in full screen mode.

I'm seeing this problem with VirtualBox 4.2.6 on OS X 10.8.2. To further complicate things, right clicking on the VM's icon in the dock and attempting to change the "Dock Icon" setting to the application icon fails to have any visual effect and also fails to reduce Dock process CPU usage. This is **not only** using fullscreen mode but also when running in a normal window.

Is there any alternate access to this setting?

The issue still exists in 4.3.4. The workaround of turning off full-screen, disabling dock preview, then re-enabling full screen still works though.

Note that the issue only exists on Linux guest VMs. I also run Windows XP guests, and for those disabling the dock preview works fine, even when the VM is in full screen.

If you change it quick to 'Application Icon' during startup of the VM it will work. In the dock select: 'Dock Icon' -> 'Show Application Icon'.
It saves +/- 15-20% of my CPU usage on a MBP.

Yet another way to accomplish this from the command line is
Change VM_NAME as required.