Host OS freezes, and only works during mouse movement

[yaku]

When I start a Windows XP virtual machine, the system comes to a complete halt - BOTH the Ubuntu host and WinXP guest. Nothing happens on the screen, nothing happens in general unless I move the mouse. When I stop moving the mouse, everything stops again. So basically the system is unusable until I quit VirtualBox (sometimes the problem stays even after the virtual machine is stopped, requiring a reboot).

This does not happen every time, but more often than not. I did not have this problem with the VirtualBox OSE version available in the Ubuntu Hardy repositories.

Some system details I thought might be relevant:

• VirtualBox: 2.0.2 closed source edition (taken from virtualbox home page)
  

• Host OS: Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 32bit.
  

• Host OS kernel: 2.6.24-21-generic (from hardy proposed repositories maybe)
  

• Guest OS: Windows XP Pro SP2, latest Guest additions installed (virtual machine was created with VirtualBox OSE 1.5, and updated by the current virtualbox installer)
  

• Machine: Acer Ferrari 4000 laptop (ATI graphics, AMD Turion64 processor) (at boot time there has always been a message like "BIOS bug: Timer not connected to IO-APIC", I wonder if it could have something to do with this)
  

• Compiz is installed but not in use.
• I have two mouse devices (wireless and wired, both USB)
• Latest EnvyNG ATI proprietary graphics drivers installed
• I have an external LCD screen in clone mode connected via DVI

A related forum thread: ​http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=4233

[Frank Mehnert]

Please could you boot your host with the kernel option noapic (either add this option manually to the grub command line or change /boot/grub/menu.lst) and check if that changes something for you?

[Frank Mehnert]

No response, closing.