USB and VM State Problems

[whitef]

Hello!

I'm having some very unusual problems with VirtualBox on OSX Mavericks (10.9.4) and Windows 8, mostly with OSX though. I have three Mac computers that are similarly configured (same OSX version) and I get the exact same results on all three.

I'm using two VMs. One is an older copy of XP that has been through may revisions of VirtualBox. The other is a fresh load of Win7/64. I'm getting the same results with both VMs.

Specifically, as the VM boots I can see the availability of USB devices that could be attached to the VM. Once the VM has completed booting, the list of available devices empties and there is now way to make any USB device on the host available to the guest. Occasionally, it will boot and have the device list available, but when I try to attach any device, I get the following: Failed to attach the USB device [bUnknown Device[/b] to virtual machine. The details are: Callee RC: NS_ERROR_FAILED (0x800706BE).

Also, the ability to capture

The second issue is the VM state at shutdown. When I shutdown the Windows OS, VirtualBox reports it as still running until I exit and reopen VirtualBox. While in this state, I can't see the properties of the VM or reset it without getting an error.

I suspect that these two things are related, but remain puzzled. It also seems that it worsens when Guest Additions gets installed. Once GA is installed, the VM will no longer capture the host DVD drive anymore and will not mount the GA CD image.

For troubleshooting, I've done the following:

- Reverted to earlier versions of Virtualbox, all the way back to 4.1. I've since settled on 4.3.12...in reading the forums it seems that is the least problematic recent release.
- Run permission repair on the Mac, no change.
- Used multiple Windows VMs.
- Created new Windows VMs.
- Tried multiple host PCs
- Moved the XP instance to a Windows 8 PC, same results (I don't have consistent access to one of these, os details are sktechy)
- Worked on the problem whilst drinking beer, and separately drinking coffee. Same results.

Sorry for the lengthy post, but this is making my completely nutty.

All insights will be appreciated.