virtualbox.org

I am trying to learn Octave, and, one of my training tasks is installing packages. So I planned to upgrade Virtual Box to the latest version and then figure out a way to transfer files from the host to the guest.

However even at such an installation stage the setup file seems to be hinting at a process which does not appear within the task manager, so I cannot really 'kill' the process, is this a feature of a windows 'ghost' process and will a restart resolve the problem?

"Ghost process" implies a dead process, which I might agree you had if you can assure me you didn't have any VMs running at the time. VirtualBox uses a background (windowless) process (VBoxSVC) to provide common services to VMs such as internal networking. Normally VBoxSVC unloads a few seconds after the last VM closes.