Guest Win7 Aero broken on Win8.1 Host

[loukingjr]

Tried getting Aero to work with a Windows 7 guest, Windows 8.1 host. Tried VB 4.3.26 and 4.3.27 (test build) along with their respective GAs. Also tried the 4.3.12 GAs.

I do have Aero working with an OSX and Linux host.

including the vbox.logs for the Windows 7 guest for both 4.3.26 and 4.3.27.
GPU is Intel HD 5300

[loukingjr]

Bugtracker # Ticket 13746

[Torchwood]

Last night I tried a Win7-SP1 32-bit Guest on a Win7-SP1 32-bit Host running Virtualbox 4.3.12 and it exhibited the same symptoms described in your bug ticket.

No Aero effects, just a solid background with lighter blocks where icons should appear on the taskbar. Switching between Full (Ctrl-F) and Scaled (Ctrl-C), sometimes would see a brief flash of the actual background - something in buffer?

The login screen looked normal, the issue only appears as screen switches into dekstop mode.

Using guest settings: 2 Gb Ram, 256 Mb video memory. Disabling 2D and 3D acceleration allowed running non-Aero desktop.

This same Win7 guest runs ok with full Aero on my Kubuntu 14.04 Linux host running Virtualbox 4.3.10. Tried downgrading the Windows host Virtualbox to 4.3.10 for the heck of it, but no better.

Both of my hosts are custom built with the same Asus motherboard, Intel chipset, Core i-3 processor, Intel HD graphics 2500. I set the guest machine settings exactly the same on both hosts and installed the guest additions on both cases. The Intel supplied graphics driver is installed on both hosts. You would think that the Linux version would be more likely to be the trouble maker, but not in this case. I am stumped, but assume this must be a bug.

Unfortunatlely, the Win7 guest works with Aero on VMware Player 6.0.5 on Win 7 host. Hate to have to use that, but it's the best workaround I can find for now.

The reason I am doing this is that I have a need to create a VM of my physical Win 7-32 bit host (P-to-V), so I can migrate the Windows host to a 64-bit host OS (Win8.1-64 or maybe Win10-64). I have some old Windows applications that will be happier on a 32-bit guest. Some Windows software that I currently use will only be developed in 64-bit versions going forward (ex: Adobe Lightroom 6). So I am doing some environment testing to see what the best solution will be. Virtualization is great!

As an fyi, the guest disks tested were a .vhd created by Microsoft Sysinternals DisktoVHD.exe and also a .vmdk created by VMware vCenter Converter standalone. I even tried mpack's utility CloneVDI.exe on the .vhd disk to convert to .vdi before running Virtualbox. All of the conversions worked, but the only thing in common was the Aero issue in the Windows host.

[thanar]

Are you talking about newly-created VMs?

[loukingjr]

Are you talking about newly-created VMs?

If you are addressing me, yes.

[Torchwood]

Are you talking about newly-created VMs?

If you were addressing me the answer is yes also.

As an fyi, the guest disks tested were newly created. A .vhd created by Microsoft Sysinternals DisktoVHD.exe and also a .vmdk created by VMware vCenter Converter standalone. I even tried mpack's utility CloneVDI.exe on the .vhd disk to convert to .vdi before running Virtualbox. All of the conversions worked, but the only thing in common was the guest Aero failed issue in the Windows 7 Virtualbox host. My Windows 7 host running VMware Player ran the guest with Aero just fine. My Ubuntu host with the same version of Virtualbox ran the guest with Aero just fine.

My reason for adding to this thread was that my symptoms were the same as the OP's bug report, even thought my host was running Windows 7 rather than Windows 8. I felt that was useful information and that starting a new thread would fragment the issue.

[loukingjr]

The OP would be moi.