virtualbox.org

I just upgraded to VBox 4.2.6 (2010 Mac Pro, 10.6..

I rarely need to fire up Windows, so I had not yet upgraded from the Windows 8 RP version to the final.

But I wanted to test and make sure all my VMs still worked OK under 4.2.6 so I fired it up anyway.

The OS starts up and I can log in. After a minute I get a popup saying the RP is expired, the system will restart itself every 2 hours, blah blah.

There is a link to go buy the final version so I clicked on it. Explorer comes up and goes to the site and then ... the OS locks up, solid.

If I shut down and restart the same thing happens. Even if I don't do the link and run Explorer, after a couple of minutes it locks up again.

I had only brought up Chrome (after dismissing the "RP is expired" window) and I didn't even have time to type in a URL before it locked up.

My other VMs (Solaris 11.1, CentOS 6.3) work perfectly fine under 4.2.6. Only this Windows 8 VM seems to be affected.

Any ideas?

If you had it installed on a physical machine, it would do the same thing. Pre-release (free) versions are time-bombed so that they cease to work after a certain time. Just delete it and install a standard version from scratch.