Heavy delays during startup of any vm during some days

[GuidoSchumacher]

Hi,
I have a Windows 7 64 Bit Host. Since a few days I have the following problem with my VirtualBox installation:

When I start a new virtual machine it takes about 1 minute, then the message box "Timed out after 60006 ms waiting for child request #1 (CloseEvents). where: supR3HardNtChildWaitFor what: Unknown status 258 (0x102)" appears. After another 60 seconds a second message box "Timed out after 60013 ms waiting for child request #1 (CloseEvents). where: supR3HardNtChildWaitFor what: Unknown status 258 (0x102)" appears. Then after about another 30 seconds or so the virtual machine starts completely normally. The machines work fine and perform well after they have started. So from a certain point of view the problem is bad performance during sturtup, only. Up till last week everything worked fine and all machines started without any error or warning within about 30 seconds.

What I found out during the past days:
1. After trying some tests I uninstalled my VirtualBox (Version 4.3.20 from sirrix (Browser in a box, <link removed> )) and installed a brand new version 5.0.10 r104061 from virtualbox. It didn't change anything.
2. The problem occurs reproducible for any virtual machine guest (Windows 7 64 Bit, Ubuntu 32 Bit, Windows XP, Windows 3.1).
3. The problem also occurs for completely new virtual machine guests which I create (so VMs which are brand new and have no operation system installed on it, 32 Bit, 64 Bit, ..., it doesn't change anything).
4. It happens for my personal account (non administative), as for administrativ accounts, too.
5. As far as I remember the only system relevant thing that I did during the time the error occurred the first time is to copy the file "VCdRom.sys" to %systemroot%\system32\drivers (it is part of <link removed>, a microsoft utility that enables users of Windows 7 to mount ISO disk image files as virtual CD-ROM drives.) But it didn't work, I think because it is an unsigned 32 bit driver for a 64 bit system. So I removed the "VCdRom.sys" file and removed the software.
6. I searched this forum and the internet for "VBOX_E_IPRT_ERROR", "VERR_NOT_SUPPORTED", "Error 258", "supR3HardNtChildWaitFor" but didn't find any hint which solved the problem.

Enclosed two log files (for VirtualBox version 4.3.20): The one is before the error occurred (VBox_before_error.log), the other after that (VBox_after_error.log). The error and different beaviour can be found up till line 950 (VBox_after_error.log).

Additionally two log files for a very brand new virtual machine (so without operating system): System Name="Test8", Type:"Linux", Version:"Ubuntu (32-bit)". The first waiting period (1 minute) occurred when VBoxHardening.log has finished line 151. The second waiting period (1 minute) occurred when VBoxHardening.log has finished line 155. The related VBox.log shows an error in line 1003, but I think it's relatively unimportant, because this happes much later than the delays.

Best Regards
Guido

[mpack]

Did you look at the host tasklist to see what was hogging CPU and/or I/O time?

[GuidoSchumacher]

Hi,
yes: There is nearly no CPU consumption over the whole time (only three very tiny peaks of about 20% CPU consumption, the rest is nearly idle). I have a Intel Core i7-4790K 4.00 GHz CPU (4 physical cores with Hyperthreading). So I don't think that it's a CPU-Performance issue.

In the ressourcemonitor I whatched the I/O handling. There was nothing VirtualBox specific visible, but lots of system-file accesses. The whole I/O workload doesn't look critical: There are some peaks, but also lots of idle states where the SSD waits for requests. I didn't see any performance issues on my SSD (Crucial CT512MX SSD).

The system doesn't hang during the startup of a VM: Other applications, the browser etc. work completely normal.

I've forgotten: I switched off my antivirus-software for some tests. But it didn't change anything.

Regards
Guido

[jabaa]

Host: Win 7
Guest: Ubuntu
VBox: 4.0.36-104075, 4.3.34-104062, 5.0.10-104061

I have exactly the same problem. I had VirtualBox installed on my system and it worked without any problem but I didn't start it for some months. Then I installed Docker but I couldn't start Docker because of this delay. So I uninstalled Docker but the problem remained. Also reinstalling VirtualBox didn't help.

[jabaa]

Switching off Avira Antivir didn't help. I had to uninstall Avira. Now it works.

Other workarounds are described in:
https://avira.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Avira ... b-comments

[GuidoSchumacher]

Really it's Avira. I uninstalled it and the problem is away.

Thank you very much!