No dropdown menus in virtual Windows 10

[KaGi]

I just installed a fresh Win 10 64 bits with Virtualbox in a fresh Linux Mint host.

I don't have access to any choice in dropdown menus of Windows. Whenever I click to make a selection (such as my choice of keyboard), nothing happens. I can only chose the default option. I tried everything I thought of, with no success.

Anyone would have a clue of what is going on?

My computer is a Dell XPS13 7390, sold with Ubuntu.

Thanks!

[scottgus1]

Start the guest from full normal shutdown, not save-state. Run until you see the problem happen, then shut down the guest from within the guest OS if possible. If not possible, close the Virtualbox window for the guest with the Power Off option set.

Right-click the guest in the main Virtualbox window's guest list, choose Show Log. Save the far left tab's log, zip it, and post the zip file, using the forum's Upload Attachment tab.

[KaGi]

Thank you very much scottgus1 for helping out.
I attached the log to this message. This is exactly what I did in the VM :

• Start the WM
• Start menu -> click the power button twice with no effect (no shut down menu)
• Settings -> Time & Language -> Language
• Select the currect default language, which is Français (Canada)
• Option button -> click "Add a keyboard" and nothing happens. Like a dead button.
• Clicked on Power to shut down the VM, didn't work (button not working)
• I shut down by closing the VM window. I had no other option.

What I wanted to do is simple : I want to select the French Canadian keyboard (it has selected the French layout from France, wich is not what we use in North America). It should be there... but I can't see it nor select it nor install it... Actually, there is several places/buttons in Windows that if I mouse-click, nothing happens.

I could stick to Linux for personal work, but I need Word, Excel and full VBA capability for share work... I got fed up with dual booting and I decided to get a good machine (Dell XPS 13 with ubuntu) and get a separate license for Windows 10 in VirtualBox just for Office. I don't see what prevent Windows to just let me click where I want.

If you have a hint for me, I'd be so grateful!

Thanks!

[KaGi]

Anyone? Anybody had the same problem?

[scottgus1]

You're using 3D acceleration and max video RAM of 256MB, which is good.
No video problems as such stand out in the log.

Try disabling Settings > Personalization > Colors > Transparency Effects in your Windows guest.

Other suggestions, probably not related to the issue:

You're running the Ubuntu fork of Virtualbox. Forks might be changed in unexpected ways, and forum gurus might ask you to change to official Virtualbox from www.virtualbox.org. You might not have to change now, just something to be ready for.

You have all six physical cores set for the guest to use. If the guest goes full throttle on all 6 cores, the host stability can suffer. Additionally, the guest will run slower with more cores due to extra scheduling oversight needed on the host. If the guest is not processing six cores' worth of data because of 3rd-party parallel-processing software installed, you should consider rolling that core slider back to 2.

[KaGi]

WOW! Disabling Transparency Effects did the trick! Everything is smooth, and I see the submenus (options) when I click something.
I got some help from a helpful MS staff to select the correct keyboard (that's so silly to have to rely on technical support for that!). The guy took control of my computer and could do it, but I didn't see anything on my screen. So it was a visual rendering problem. I really don't care about fancy stuff like transparency.

Concerning the number of cores, you wrote 6 (I have a DELL XPS13 i7 10th generation), and VirtualBox allows me up to 12 (sliding bar), and allows me to select up to 6 cores for the VM to stay in "green area". Let's say VirtualBox is wrong and I have 6 cores, is there a rule in the "art" of splitting resources? For example, can I select 3 for the host and 3 for the guest, or should I go in even numbers, such as 2-4 or 4-2? Can either systems work with an odd number of cores?

[scottgus1]

Glad the disable worked!

Your log reports this for the host processor:

00:00:01.075287 Full Name: "Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-10710U CPU @ 1.10GHz"
00:00:01.074763 CPUM: Logical host processors: 12 present, 12 max, 12 online, online mask: 0000000000000fff
00:00:01.074942 CPUM: Physical host cores: 6

Modern OS's 'market-speak' the hyperthreads on a processor so users end up thinking they're getting more than they think. Hyperthreads only help if the two threads want to use different parts of the processor. If they both want to use the same part, then one thread must wait.

Hyperthreads don't help Virtualbox run guests, so they don't count. You have six cores available for the guest. There are some rare use cases where telling a guest OS there's more processors to use than the host has can help, but you're talking esoteric developer stuff, not typical users, and most folks get in trouble trying to 'invent' processors by sliding that slider all the way up. (FWIW the slider coloring has been discussed, and it isn't always accurate: My 4-core non-hyperthreaded Core I5 shows 4 green 4 red on that slider.) <this is wrong, see below

The 'art' side of setting that slider is to pick what will set the guest OS on its best feet, but not more than is necessary. OS's from XP-era onward like two cores. (XP was OK on one core but if that one core went to 100% the desktop was sluggish.) However, extra cores make threads run slower because the host OS takes two threads and spreads them among 3 cores and has to keep track of the calculations. So a three core guest running just the OS should be slower than two cores by a possibly measurable amount. Only if there is 3rd-party software that can generate data to fill extra cores, like parallel-processing video conversion or blockchain or protein-folding, etc. wold the extra cores get filled with their own threads.

[fth0]

(FWIW the slider coloring has been discussed, and it isn't always accurate: My 4-core non-hyperthreaded Core I5 shows 4 green 4 red on that slider.)

Being one of the people talking esoteric developer stuff , I beg to differ on this statement (and this statement alone):

The slider coloring is accurate, just some peoples' interpretations aren't. The green area always goes up to the number of CPU cores, always being in the middle, and the red area is always showing overcommitment of some kind. For example, if your CPU has 4 cores, the slider will go from 1 to 8, independent of the 4 CPU cores providing hyperthreading or not. For a full detailed explanation - unfortunately distributed over a whole discussion thread - see viewtopic.php?f=8&t=98388.

[scottgus1]

The slider coloring is accurate, just some peoples' interpretations aren't.

I'll have to throw myself amongst the second group then.

I remember that thread. Looking back at it again I do see the slider coloring indicates overcommitment, not cores vs hyperthreads.

I'll try to reprogram my head for that, then. Just like where Mpack said something that finally got me able to understand why snapshots get "deleted" but the data gets merged, not deleted... (They're time markers, not just differencing disks.)