WinXP guest messed up

[cometk]

I did something to my XP guest and now the Virtualbox menu is gone. I was fiddling with the view settings but not sure what I did. The Ctrl Alt host key combo doesn't seem to do anything either. Help!

[socratis]

What VirtualBox menu are you referring to? A screenshot (attached locally) would help explain more, if necessary. And the HostKey can be set from the VirtualBox Manager preferences.

[cometk]

Digging around in VB... status bar in the lower right corner is gone. I somehow got a small menu at the top center of the window, the view dropdown led me to some setting that put me where I am now, no menus and screwed up graphics. I could get you a screen shot but it would just be a plain WinXP desktop with a few icons.

[cometk]

I had to shrink this quite a bit to get the board to accept the upload. This is my xp guest on top of my Win7 desktop. The window borders are different than they used to be as well. It seems like I just hit some view setting by accident that I can't get out of.

[socratis]

OK, now I get it. You changed the settings for your User Interface. Go to your VM Settings » User Interface and there you can enable your status bar (all or individual icons) and the menu items you want. The VM needs to be shut down for the changes to show. Or they'll show the next time.

[cometk]

I'm not really seeing what in the settings can be changed... every box is checked already. I shut down and restarted the VM but no changes.

[socratis]

Doesn't make sense. The settings seem OK (both status bar and menu bar checked) yet they don't show. Try to shutdown VirtualBox, wait for 1', and try again. If it doesn't work:

• Right-click on the VM, "Show in Explorer". It's going to show a WinExplorer window with a selected ".vbox" file.
• Find the file "C:\Users\<you>\.VirtualBox\VirtualBox.xml" (note the "." before VirtualBox).
• ZIP the two files together. Attach the ZIP to your reply.

[cometk]

Somehow I got stuck in scale mode and after googling around found some host key combo that got me a menu with the view settings to get out of it. I guess in scale mode the menus are not available.

[cometk]

Which does remind me of one other thing... in my Win7 host I can alt-tab to the guest, but once I'm in the guest I can't alt-tab back out because of course the alt tab is switching between apps in the guest. Is there any key combo that can switch me out of the guest into the host, similar to alt-tab?

[Martin]

Press the 'host key' once before alt-tab.

[socratis]

Somehow I got stuck in scale mode

Scale mode! Of course! I completely forgot about the looks of that mode. It's been several years since I've tested it (briefly). Sorry about the confusion...