Shared clipboard and shared folders require Windows Explorer

[mnz2000]

I am running VirtualBox 4.2.2 on Windows 7 host with Windows XP guests. The Windows XP guests are running Perl scripts and require no user-interface. I am thus running with VBoxHeadless.exe and have replaced the Windows Explorer shell in the guest with cmd.exe by setting the registry key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System\Shell to "cmd.exe /k C:\startup.cmd".

This setup works fine except that shared clipboard and shared folders won't work. When connecting with VRDP (Windows 7's Remote Desktop Connection), clipboard isn't shared. When trying to access
vboxsvr\xxx I get "The network path was not found".

These problems go away as soon as I start Windows Explorer (by typing "explorer" in the cmd.exe prompt). After that, the shared clipboard works fine, as well as the shared folders. The strange thing is that if I kill explorer.exe from Task Manager, shared clipboard and shared folders continue working fine. It seems they don't actually need explorer.exe except for some initialization.

I don't think VirtualBox should have a dependency on Windows Explorer like this.

[mnz2000]

Log file where the issue appeared. At 00:32:17 I started explorer.exe. About 1 minute later shared folders started working (later than the "Guest Additions capability report" lines were logged). At 00:34:58 I killed the Explorer.exe process. In the next VRDP session shared folders and shared clipboard still worked fine.

[bird]

The reason why shared clipboard doesn't work could be that VBoxTray.exe isn't running in your setup. Try launch it manually and see if it improves the situation. I doubt this will help with the shared folder issue though, but please let us know if it does.

[mnz2000]

If I start VBoxTray without explorer.exe running, shared clipboard and shared folders still won't work. Interestingly, if I start explorer.exe after VBoxTray, they still won't work. Only after killing VBoxTray and restarting it (while explorer.exe is running), both shared clipboard and shared folders start working.

If I kill VBoxTray, shared clipboard stops working (as expected). Shared folders, however, keep working (again, as expected because VBoxTray doesn't implement them AFAIK).

So I see two points of improvement for VirtualBox:

1. Let shared clipboard work if VBoxTray is started without explorer.exe.

2. Let shared folders work if neither VBoxTray nor explorer.exe has been started. This is a priority since it allows UI-less VM's to exchange data with the host with minimal memory usage. If I need shared clipboard, I usually need explorer.exe anyway so starting it isn't a problem.

[aeichner]

Please reopen if still relevant with a recent VirtualBox release.