Seamless: Some windows invisible -> fixed in 3.0.6

[Matěj Gottwald]

Host system: Windows Vista x86 SP1 Guest system: Ubuntu 8.04 VirtualBox version: 2.0.2 Guest Additions version: 2.0.2 AMD-V enabled

When I turn the Seamless Mode on, some applications (especially those included in the system itself like Nautilus, Disk manager etc.) simply don't bring up any window - no window is shown. The window is visible only in case another window, which can be shown, appears under the invisible window. Or let me put it this way - the visible window acts as desktop or screen and the "invisible" window is shown only within its boundaries.

Screenshot enclosed.

[Matěj Gottwald]

Firefox's window properly shown and visible, Nautilus window invisible.

[jimrandomh]

This bug, or one quite similar to it, happens consistently on multimonitor systems, if you place the VirtualBox window on a secondary monitor and press the seamless mode hotkey. Affects both Windows and Linux guests.

[Michael Thayer]

This should be fixed now.

[NotAlwaysGruntled]

This problem has recurred over the years - see https://www.virtualbox.org/search?q=seamless+invisible&noquickjump=1&ticket=on for a list of relevant bug reports. At present, on Linux Mint 21.1 Cinnamon, and using VirtualBox 7.0, and a Windows guest, setting 'seamless' mode renders the view of the guest completely invisible and, aside from the 'host' hotkeys, un-interactable with. And I've had this problem with older, but still fairly recent, versions of VirtualBox (and of course often the whole out-of-tree module situation makes everything harder).

[NotAlwaysGruntled]

Or, er, is Seamless Mode meant to make everything disappear? (See ​https://www.howtogeek.com/171145/use-virtualboxs-seamless-mode-or-vmwares-unity-mode-to-seamlessly-run-programs-from-a-virtual-machine/.)

[NotAlwaysGruntled]

It transpires that, of the many moving parts of VirtualBox, and amongst its welter of terminology, the part that one needs to poke (or the thing that one needs to do), in order to make the guest expand to take up the whole screen, is . . update the 'extension pack', from within the guest (a.k.a. the 'virtual machine') - even though I was pretty sure that I had the current 'pack'. And of course, that which elsewhere is called the 'extension pack' is called, by the relevant 'guest' menu, 'guest additions'.

How could I have missed that obvious approach?