Windows NT/2000 Guest Seamless Mode Grayed Out?

[Doqtor Kirby]

Hello VirtualBox Forums,
I am having a problem with a guest Windows 2000 not wanting to go into Seamless Mode, rather, the option is grayed out and I can't select it. I have reinstalled the Guest Additions three times, increased both the RAM and Video Memory, turned on PAE/NX, and whatever other options there are. I don't know what is going on, as it worked fine before. Is there something I can do perhaps? The Host OS is Windows 7 and the VirtualBox version is 4.3.0.

Cheers,
-Kirby

edit.
It doesn't seem to work in my Windows NT install either.

[mpack]

VM log file please. Minimum information needed for assistance.

[Doqtor Kirby]

Ohph! My bad. Logs attached (both 2000 and NT).

[mpack]

I see you're still running v4.3.0. A number of important bugs was fixed in 4.3.2, so I recommend you upgrade, or downgrade to 4.2.18. Sticking with any .0 release is the worst optionl

If the option is grayed out then VirtualBox is deliberately withholding this feature from you. Does the settings dialog give you any warnings about not having graphics memory for fullscreen?

[Doqtor Kirby]

No it does not give me any issues about fullscreen, and I can go in and out of fullscreen as I please.
I was going to update this morning but apparently it says I'm running the latest and greatest.
I would think that VBox is, as when I read the log myself, I found a few lines saying "seamless: no, hostWindowMapping: no, graphics, no" and that might have something to do with it.

But yeah I'll go grab x.2 real fast and see if that helps any.

edit.
I updated to 4.3.2. No dice.

[mpack]

Ah sorry, I was thinking of another user when I talked about fullscreen.

I can confirm that seamless mode doesn't work on an NT4 guest (SP6a). I don't have a Win2k guest here to test with.

On what version of VirtualBox did seamless mode work with these guests?

[Doqtor Kirby]

Last time I ran a 2K in seamless mode was in 4.1.x on a Fedora host. I'm thinking it may have something to do with the Host system. (Windows 7)

[mpack]

I'm thinking it may have something to do with the Host system. (Windows 7)

I don't really see how. Windows hosts are well supported, and nothing particularly earth shattering is required for seamless (just a transparent blit). And anyway your problem isn't that seamless mode doesn't work, it's just that you're not being allowed to use it.

The problem must be on the host, but it's the VBox host application where the problem must lie, not the host OS. In my own test earlier I tested NT4 on an XP host, so the problem is not Win7 specific, and nor is it a problem with the GAs (which I didn't update).

My guess is that the GAs ask VBoxSVC if switching to seamless is ok, and VBoxSVC says no for some reason. I just can't think of a legit reason. I think you should raise this in the 4.3.2 discussion forum, perhaps also raise a BugTracker ticket for it. Possibly the change is deliberate, e.g. some security problem that's fixed in XP and later guests.

Edit:  Here at home I have a Win2K-Pro VM I can try... and it did not gray out the seamless menu item until I updated the GAs. So, I suspect two things are going on. (1) The NT4 GAs never supported seamless, (2) There has been a change in the 4.3.x GAs which stops it supporting seamless on Win2k. Reverting to older GAs might fix this, but I can't tell you how old (I hadn't run this Win2k VM in a long time, it was still using VBox 2.6.4 GAs!).

[Doqtor Kirby]

Ok, so I downgraded the guest additions to 3.2.18 and seamless works fine. I'll still look into why it won't work with current additions.

edit.
Tried with NT as well, no seamless, so no, NT doesn't work with seamless mode.

[mpack]

Hmm. I was hoping you would attempt to pin it down to a narrower version range than that. If you can tell the devs "in version 4.x seamless mode stopping working in the Win2k GAs" then you might stand a chance of getting it fixed: a bugtracker ticket would also be required of course.

[Vance]

To fix this problem you need to install an additional SP & Rollup on the 2k guest. The SP is an unofficial service pack obtained from an author named tomasz86 on msfn dot org. The name of it is w2ksp51.exe. The rollup is named Windows2000-UURollup-v10d-x86-ENU.exe & is from the same author. I tried it after installing just USP5-no joy. Installed the rollup & it now works!!! Other information from this author might be of benefit also. I am currently on VirtualBox 4.3.8