virtualbox.org

Hi,
This is a fairly weird little problem that I've had for a year or so. It impacts only one application that I know of.

The system is Gentoo, mostly stable, kernel is 4.4.26-gentoo, NVidia drivers, Virtualbox-4.3.38_Gentoo r106717 which is the most recent stable version of Virtualbox. The application is TradeStation Version 9.5, any rev as far as I know, running in a Win 7 VM. Windows is up-to-date.

The problem is for this application only, when first using the app and first choosing a menu item, the screen buffer keeps a sort of dim copy of the item chosen from the menu. Minimizing the app doesn't make it go away. Locking the screen shows the 'ghost' on the login screen, and after logging in it's still there. Logging out completely doesn't fix it. See attached screenshots at this link:

[Mod edit: Removed dead link. That's why you should attach screenshots here, on the forums.]

As it turns out, a work around is to choose 'Switch User' from the Windows logout menu. This causes the screen to apparently go through some additional work, cleans out the ghost. I log back in as the same user and from then on it's fine.

My suspicion is this is a corner case in the Virtualbox video driver.

This does not happen with TradeStation Version 9.1.

I have not tried any version of Virtualbox newer than the one I'm reporting here. I thought I'd look for similar issues in the forums to see if this has been addressed before going the Gentoo testing version route.

If someone needs more info please let me know.

Thanks,
Mark

So after a few months of this problem, and sadly the problem began to appear on other apps as well in multiple Win 7 VMs, I found an apparent solution. If anyone ever should ever find this post they can try these changes in Windows 7 as they worked for me:

1. Right click on Computer and left click on Properties.
2. On the left hand side click on Advanced system settings.
3. Under the Advanced tab, go to the Performance section and left click on Settings.
4. Within the Performance Options window under the Visual Effects tab choose the Custom radio button.
5. From the list that appears below the Custom radio button, uncheck the following: the first 3 fade options, the next 2 show shadow options, and show translucent option.
6. Apply and click OK.

To be clear, this seems to be an unaddressed issue in newer versions of Virtualbox and having fixed it this way I'll never know if Virtualbox got fixed, but that's life sometimes.

HTH

MarkKnecht wrote:Virtualbox-4.3.38_Gentoo r106717

This is the Gentoo forked version of VirtualBox. Uninstall that one and install the official one from https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
And since you're at it, download the latest and greatest, 5.1.12 as of this writing...