virtualbox.org

Thanks to all those involved in maintaining the 4.2 releases of VirtualBox. I use that for daily software development with Windows XP and Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0. I know the difficulties and frustrations in maintaining older versions of large applications. I sincerely appreciate all the effort that goes into VirtualBox, and that effort is evident in the usefulness and quality of the software.

Overall, I have found the releases of VirtualBox to be quite stable and reliable. I haven't used the 4.3 versions, but past experience has made me cautious. Adding new features tends to introduce bugs. I usually wait until a version is in the .20 and above revision numbers before I consider using it. That is not a criticism of those developing the 4.3 version, as I think every reasonable effort is being made to introduce as few bugs as possible during development.

There are three issues that I have noticed in the last three or four releases of the 4.2 version. I'm not sure if they are issues with all versions of VirtualBox or just 4.2. Also, they may be specific to Windows XP guests.

1. In seamless mode the guest windows are sometimes not completely updated with changes to the display. The problem looks like it is caused by graphics layering, or not completely finishing all the writes to the graphics device. The menu bar and edges of a window are often black instead of the correct color. Moving, minimizing or maximizing the affected guest window repaints the window correctly. I have tested this with two different nVidia graphics cards and one AMD/ATI graphics card, so I am relatively sure this isn't specific to one particular graphics card or driver in the host OS. I have only seen this problem on my Windows 7 64-bit Host OS, and not Slackware Linux 64-bit. I haven't tested on other versions of Windows or Linux. It is also possible this is a Windows 7 bug, since I see something similar when using Firefox 26 or 28 on the same host OS.
2. To start a virtual machine in seamless mode, I now have to include the option "--seamless" on the "VirtualBox.exe" command line that starts the virtual machine. However, that does not always work correctly. If the guest OS takes longer than expected to start up the virtual box additions due to a busy host or guest OS, then the guest hangs. If I remove "--seamless" from the command line the problem does not happen. I think this was a problem in previous versions, except that they would automatically try to switch to seamless mode if that is how the window was displayed when the machine was last shut down. The previous versions would randomly hang on startup if the host OS was busy, but I did not know that it related to using seamless mode.
3. Windows XP hangs randomly. After a lot of experimentation the problem seems related to USB, perhaps power management, and happens less frequently or not at all when I disable USB for the virtual machine. I don't see any errors in the log for the virtual machine, but I usually see messages about power management at the end of the log. The problem also happens more frequently if I use the Intel SATA driver and SATA disks in the guest instead of PIIX 4. Strangely, the problem also happens more frequently after I de-fragment my host hard disk even though the virtual disk for the Windows XP is a fixed size un-fragmented file. Sometimes when the hang occurs the mini toolbar for the virtual machine is a sort of grainy red color rather than being correctly painted. It is difficult to find the Intel SATA drivers, but I believe that I have the latest available version. I have also installed Intel chipset updates.

All of the above problems are infrequent enough that they don't cause major problems for me using VirtualBox.

A recent problem that I've noticed on both Windows and Linux hosts is that my Slackware Linux systems using KDE 4.10 or 4.11 do not paint the KDE panel correctly. The bar at the bottom of the Slackware guest is often white or black instead of silver. I'm not sure if this relates to problem 1 above. The problem happens only with newer versions of KDE in a Slackware guest. KDE version 4.9 in a Slackware guest does not exhibit the problem. The problem happens with a 32 or 64-bit host OS that is either Windows or Linux, and it happens with either a 32-bit or 64-bit Slackware guest. The problem happens with desktop effects turned off, and the virtual machine has 2D and 3D graphics acceleration disabled.

I have not been able to get KDE desktop effects in versions 4.9 and later to work in a Slackware VirtualBox guest OS. I'm not sure if that is a know limitation or a bug. Even when I enable 3D graphics acceleration, KDE does not appear to detect that 3D graphics is available.

If anyone can confirm that they have seen these problems, or provide some insight as to the causes and solutions I will appreciate it. I don't mind collecting information for debugging, though I have no experience in debugging any VirtualBox problems.

Thank you for the report. What would help speed up our investigation in finding regressions is to create a bug ticket (https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Bugtracker) if one doesn't exist already and provide sufficient information (VBox.log is almost always a must).

In your case, you can probably create 2 tickets, i.e. separate the seamless issues from the Windows XP hang that you say is related to USB.