Virtualbox crashes when opening settings of running guest

[fx-jakarta]

Hello,

My VirtualBox crashes when I open the settings of a running guest.

How to reproduce:
1. Launch a VM.
2. Open File > Settings
3. The Settings window opens for a split second.
4. The VM wil crash with the following message: "The exception unknown software exception (0xc06d007e) occurred in the application at location 0xfddab3dd.", giving me the option either to OK or Cancel. Both options lead nowhere, the guest machine is killed, and its state becomes "Aborted".

Useful information:
- Logs are not really talking to me. I uploaded them to this post, let me know if there is anything special you see,

Logs.zip

(50.93 KiB) Downloaded 55 times

- The crash of a VM does not affect the other running VMs.
- I can open the settings without any problem from the Settings button of the VirtualBox Manager window (not from the guest iteslf), even if the VM is running.
- From the guest satus bar, if I try to open the individual settings from there (shared folder, audio, network, etc..), it crashes also.
- Host: Windows 7 Pro SP1 with Core i3 and 8GB of RAM.
- VirtualBox: v4.3.26. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling and it did not help.
- The guest OS does not have any impact on the issue. Even a machine with no OS has the issue.

I did a quick search but could not find exactly similar problems. Please let me know if there are similar topics I missed.

Thanks in advance for your help,
FX

[mpack]

You are running an XP guest on a Windows host - I'd guess that is the most common setups, and I don't recall anyone else reporting this crash.

You might try upgrading to the current version (4.3.28) and see if it still happens.

Also, if you could temporarily disable DropBox - or at least stop it loading inside the VBox process space - then perhaps that would help too.

[fx-jakarta]

Hello mpack,

Thanks for your answer. Here are comments to reply your thoughts.

• Upgraded VirtualBox to the current version (4.3.28), and the problem still occurs.
• I also killed the Dropbox process to make sure (even though Dropbox is not configured to run on the folder with the VMs or the VirtualBox app), and the problem still happens with no dropbox process launched.

I just tried with a Windows 7 guest and with a Ubuntu 15.04 guest, and they fail the same way when I open Settings.
However, I created a brand new guest, no specific configuration, inserted a Ubuntu live CD, and it does not fail when I open Settings. Any idea why this one does not fail when the others do?

Thanks,
FX

[mpack]

I can only imagine that it implies a problem with the settings file (the .vbox file). Did you do anything not already mentioned, such as move these VMs between PCs?

[fx-jakarta]

It is probable, since those VMs are quite old...
Moving the VM from one PC to another, or renaming the VM, or renaming the attached disk images are operations that I may have done on thsese VMs.

Is it possible to find the faulty parameter or repair the vbox file?

Thanks,

[mpack]

Can you narrow the range of what "quite old" means? If the VMs are sufficiently old then they didn't even use .vbox files.

If they are not that old then you could just delete the .vbox file and create a new VM around the existing VDI. Do not try this if the VM uses snapshots, is a linked clone etc. In fact, it's a good idea to make a backup of the VM first.

[fx-jakarta]

These VMs are 2 years old probably.
But they use snapshots, for sure !
OK, thanks for the advice, I'll probably re-create them anyway !