[Solved]VBox doesn't use my own user profile dir anymore

[RoestVrijStaal]

Good evening,

Since Today i found out that VirtualBox doesn't use my .Virtualbox folder in my own User profile folder in Win7 Pro 32-bits. After running an update to 2.4.2, It looked like it was fixed.
However, after a reboot, VirtualBox is using C:\Windows\system32\config\systemprofile\.VirtualBox again.

I tried to find out if the same thing is going on on WinXP 32-bit, but even after rebooting several times, I couldn't produce the error there.

How do i make VirtualBox obedient again? This system is used by more persons and I don't want that everyone has access to my VM's via the C:\Windows\system32\config\systemprofile\.VirtualBox configuration folder.

Sidenote: I don't want to run VirtualBox as a service or something, or using remote control / telnet / different frontend (addressing the problemsolvers which i found here about who faced also the C:\Windows\system32\config\systemprofile\.VirtualBox-issue ).

[RoestVrijStaal]

Hello. I think it's solved by myself now.

Some app removed my %AppData% environment variable from the registery key: My Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders, which caused that VirtualBox couldn't find the config files to bootstrap.

I discovered that after creating user environment variable %VBOX_USER_HOME% to my %USERPROFILE%, and NetBeans seemed to suffer from the same issue as well.

However, for the people who want to keep using %VBOX_USER_HOME% somehow, add the .Virtualbox-folder also to the path of the environment variable, because VirtualBox doesn't create a folder .VirtualBox during start up, but only drops the config files in the given path.