Failed to create the VirtualBox COM object

[jnuey]

Running 4.3.12 on Windows 8 everything worked fine up until this point until getting this error today. I tried updating to the most current version of Vbox without luck. I also ran the setup as admin and tried the compatibility with Windows 8 and Windows XP service pack 3 based on other recommendations.


Failed to create the VirtualBox COM object.

The application will now terminate.



Start tag expected, '<' not found.

Location: 'C:\Users\Chris/.VirtualBox\VirtualBox.xml', line 1 (0), column 1.

D:\tinderbox\win-4.3\src\VBox\Main\src-server\VirtualBoxImpl.cpp[531] (long __cdecl VirtualBox::init(void)).

Result Code: E_FAIL (0x80004005)
Component: VirtualBox
Interface: IVirtualBox {fafa4e17-1ee2-4905-a10e-fe7c18bf5554}

[noteirak]

Go to C:\Users\Chris\.VirtualBox and look for a file called VirtualBox.xml-prev.
If that file exists:
1. Make sure no VirtualBox process is running (especially VBoxSVC)
2. Make a copy of VirtualBox.xml then delete the original file
3. Rename VirtualBox.xml-prev to VirtualBox.xml
4. Try to start VirtualBox again

[jnuey]

Awesome thanks!

[jnuey]

By the way, do you know what caused this?

[noteirak]

I'm afraid not. All I can tell you is that file is the central configuration of VirtualBox and it got somewhat corrupted. Tends to happen when VBoxSVC gets killed typically.
The big question is - what happened that lead it to be killed. That could be hard shutdown, power failure, OS memory starvation, or even a user killing the process (willingly or not).