Mac Leopard Spaces sometimes causes VirtualBox window to disappear entirely

[poulsbo]

This has happened to me a few times. I don't have simple reproducible steps since I really try to avoid this as much as possible. When it happens I have to force quite VirtualBox and deal with potential data loss and disk corruption.

Steps go roughly like so though:

1. Start up VirtualBox (in my case running XP SP3 on VirtualBox 2.0.0 on Mac Leopard 10.5.4 with Spaces running), launch XP SP3 guest in normal window mode (not fullscreen, not seamless).
2. Now do something that makes Spaces auto-switch over to a different workspace. Voila -- the VirtualBox window is gone and cannot be recovered. Alt-Tab at this point shows that the Mac thinks the VirtualBox app is hidden, but it can't be unhidden. Now to proceed you have to force quit VirtualBox.

[poulsbo]

It's not just Spaces! I have turned off Spaces until this issue is fixed. I had a big reduction in the problem, but the problem now shows up differently. Configuration:

• Mac Leopard 10.5.5
• Spaces OFF
• VirtualBox 2.0.2
• Running VirtualBox VM app without VirtualBox app (I assume this is allowed).

Problems:

• Hide VirtualBox VM stops working sometimes. The window can still be minimized.
• I can get into a really weird state where the VirtualBox VM app thinks it is hidden, but I can't unhide it. So I can't get to the menus. The window is still visible. Another symptom, in this state, is that the window decoration icons (lower right corner) for the virtual hardware are all dead (no mouse over action occurs). The only way out of this state is to quit the guest OS and relaunch.

This problem occurs pretty regularly for me -- please let me know if there are things I can do to help diagnose it.

[Frank Mehnert]

Please reopen if still relevant with VBox 4.1.6.