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I've been running everything from 4.3.10 to 4.3.15 and I'm getting constant bluescreens in Windows 7 guests. They are fresh instals as well as older guests. The timing seems to be random, but always within a few minutes. When I can catch the BSOD information, it's regarding "REFERENCE_BY_POINTER". The bugcheck is 0x00000018.

I've never had an issue like this with virtualbox before. I'm going to try to roll back to a 4.2.x version and see if it improves. Attached is a log file from 4.3.10, if anyone can take a look. I'm not sure where else to go from here. Host is XP SP3, Intel Core2Duo, 2.93Ghz, 3GB Ram.

Thanks for reading!

VirtualBox VM 4.3.10 r93012 win.x86 (Mar 26 2014 20:17:29) release log
00:03:04.290754 Guest Additions information report: Version 4.2.6 r82870 '4.2.6'
Update the guest additions to match the running version of VirtualBox.

If you still have issues try reducing the memory to 1024MB.

Lastly IIRC there may have been an issue with 4.3.10 and Win7 which was fixed in 4.3.12 so I would upgrade if you still have issues after trying the above.

First, thank you for taking the time to help me out and read through the log! I appreciate it.

I just upgraded to 4.3.12, updated guest additions appropriately, and decreased the memory to 1gb. (Probably should have done these one at a time, but I just want this fixed already). Then I did my best to make it crash, and it did seem more stable, but I was able to get another REFERENCE_BY_POINTER BSOD. Granted, I fired up a bunch of memory-hogging applications on the host to try to stress it out. Maybe you can tell from the log if this is memory-related? I was under the impression that once the VM was started, it locked (or reserved) the designated amount of memory. Is this incorrect?

The most recent log is attached. I also have the minidump from the guest OS, if that would be of any help.

I theory the guest does lock in the memory but you have to take into account the host part of VirtualBox as well. If you are running extremely low on free available memory that will cause your issue as well. Only way to tell is to restrict that usage on the host to see if the guest stays running.


00:00:00.659143 Host RAM: 3070MB total, 1420MB available
00:00:00.824488 RamSize <integer> = 0x0000000040000000 (1 073 741 824, 1 024 MB)
00:00:00.824942 VRamSize <integer> = 0x0000000008000000 (134 217 728, 128 MB)

At guest startup the host only has 268MB left and depending on what you are doing it can drop to a critical level. You can also try running the guest at 512MB and see if that helps. I know some say that Windows 7 must have 1024MB, but in truth it depends on what you are using it for.

Note: there is also a possibility that you have a faulty memory stick. These usually start to indicate more when you press the limit of memory.

I thought the VRamSize indicated virtual memory? Anyway you may be onto something about possible bad ram, I did have a strange "bad image" error recently that I thought was unrelated or just a fluke, because it didn't happen again. I'm going to run a memory test overnight and see what happens. I'll let you know how it goes. Thanks again.

VRAM = Video RAM, i.e. the memory reserved for the emulated graphics card.

Well Memtest86+ completed four passes overnight and didn't find any memory problems. I can still force a crash, even with a light load on the host. Any other thoughts on this? Can I conclude that this is a memory issue rather than a Virtualbox issue? I'm a little hesitant to do that, only because this problem is recent and I haven't seen it at all in the past.

An update on this issue...I've done some more experimenting, and I can recreate this issue even with barely any memory load on the host. While I was initially willing to chalk it up to a memory issue, I rolled back to one of the earlier versions that I knew had worked, 4.2.6, and I cannot recreate a single crash, even with an intentionally heavy memory load on the host. I tried several other 4.2.x builds and stopped at 4.2.16. On all of these 4.2.x builds, I just can't get a crash to happen, no matter how hard I try.

This is leading me to believe that there's actually some kind of regression in 4.3.x. Anyone have any input on this, or see anything similar?