Version 4.1.26 XP Guest Hangs

[ErikW]

I've been having intermittent problems with different versions of VirtualBox running an XP guest. I use a 64-bit Windows 7 Professional host with a 32-bit Windows XP Professional guest. Version 4.1.24 has been working very well for me with many days or even weeks between seeing occasional XP guest hangs.

I boot the host OS and guest virtual machine every morning and run both of them all day doing software development. For many days at a time I do no compiling nor debugging with Visual Studio but I still get hangs. A lot of the time I just use Visual Studio to edit C code that runs on an embedded target board. My compilers are all command-line programs and I download files using TCP/IP. There's no debugger on the embedded target, so the only interaction is downloading files using a file transfer client

After upgrading to Version 4.1.26 I am having many hangs per day (3 or 4) and sometimes they happen right after rebooting the XP guest, so that I can't continue working. The hangs seemed to mostly happen when scrolling a document window in Visual Studio. I saw three or four hangs in a row after repeatedly rebooting the XP guest and then scrolling a document without doing any compilation or debugging in Visual Studio. These hangs also look slightly different than the ones I've seen in the past. If I click the mini toolbar it has sort of grainy red color and is not drawn properly. I finally re-installed VirtualBox 4.1.24 without rebooting the host, and that fixed the frequent hangs.

I can use 4.1.24 for running my Windows XP guest with infrequent hangs, but it doesn't work very well for Linux guests. The seamless mode doesn't work for Linux guests on my Windows host OS.

Can anyone suggest a way to make seamless mode work on 4.1.24 or to avoid the frequent XP guest hangs in 4.1.26? Has anyone seen this XP guest hang problem?

I'm very reluctant to upgrade to 4.2 because the few times that I've tried it I had frequent hangs of the XP guest. I'm pretty much stuck using whatever version of VirtualBox will run XP the best.

I am using a fixed size virtual hard disk. In the guest I have tried various versions of the Intel SATA driver for Windows XP and also have tried using IDE instead of SATA. Neither of those things affected the hanging problem. I also tested with no video acceleration versus 2D acceleration. I don't use 3D acceleration at all. What is strange about the hangs is sometimes they happen repeatedly after 30 seconds or so when I reboot the XP guest. When that happens, even rebooting the host computer does not always solve the problem. The repeated hangs usually happen after I have de-fragmented my host computer. That makes no sense because the virtual disk file never becomes fragmented. Different versions of VirtualBox experience the hang problem more often than others. Usually the mini toolbar still works, and is painted correctly, but the guest window does not respond to anything.

If someone will give me instructions for how to get useful information about the hangs I don't mind starting VirtualBox in debug mode while I'm working. I don't write Windows drivers or kernel code so I don't have the Windows debugger or OS symbols in my host or guest OS. I have looked in the logs for the virtual machine and the Windows event logs. There are no errors logged near the time of the hang and no unusual messages in the logs.

[mpack]

A VM log file would be useful I think - please read Minimum information needed for assistance.

[ErikW]

I was able to work around this problem by disabling USB in the virtual machine settings. The problem seems to have something to do with power management for the USB ports. If the host USB ports have gone into a low power state, then the guest virtual machine tends to hang shortly afterward. I tried disabling the power management for the guest XP machine's USB ports but that did not fix the problem. I'm not actually using any USB devices in the virtual machine, and none of the USB devices identified in USB filters were connected. Just enabling USB support for the virtual machine is enough to cause a hang if the host USB ports are in low power state.