virtualbox.org

If I do not run VB as Administrator I get the critical error "Failed to create the VirtualBox COM object" when starting the application. If my user is part of the Administrators group and I run VB I get the error. If I choose "Run as administrator" it works fine. I have reinstalled and repaired to no avail. I have deleted and recreated the .VirtualBox directory. Running as administrator is not a long term solution since I can only use the access temporarily when installing things at my job. And when running under a separate account like that the Windows hot-keys in the guest do not work correctly (they are always passed on to the host.) This is just a straight install with no third-party addins.

Windows 7 64-Bit
VirtualBox VM 4.2.12 r84980

Check the properties of the shortcut and make sure it is not set to run as administer.

It's not.

Sounds like this is on a corp. network. Are there any group policies that could be stopping you from running VBox as you?

That's an interesting thought, but others running the same managed workstation in the same AD container are running without a problem.

What about checking the Event Log for anything related to Virtualbox?

Nothing in the Event Log. But I figured out what it was, I think. I have another account that has Admin rights on the box. Somehow the system environment variable HOME was hard coded with the profile path of that user. Apparently VB was using the variable to find the .VirtualBox directory (I discovered this using Process Monitor) so it was trying to open a folder it had no rights to. So I changed the HOME variable to be "%USERPROFILE%" so it would be correct for each user. After doing that VB works normally. Weird. I can't figure out what would have made a change like that.

I don't think the answer would be what, but rather who...