Failed to Initialize COM (Solaris non-global zone)

[bewst]

I have installed VIrtualBox in a non-global zone on OpenSolaris 2009.06, but I can't list the ostypes:

dave@vbox:/$ pfexec /usr/bin/VBoxManage list ostypes                                                                              
VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 3.0.6
(C) 2005-2009 Sun Microsystems, Inc.
All rights reserved.

ERROR: failed to initialize COM!

This is not the same problem as #4899:

dave@vbox:/$ pfexec pkg install SUNWuiu8                                                                                          
No updates available for this image.    
dave@vbox:/$ python                                                                                                               
1) /usr/bin/python2.4
2) /usr/bin/python
dave@vbox:/$ pfexec /usr/bin/VBoxManage list ostypes                                                                             
VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 3.0.6
(C) 2005-2009 Sun Microsystems, Inc.
All rights reserved.

ERROR: failed to initialize COM!

[bewst]

This appears to be some kind of a permissions issue; if I su in the global zone and then do my zlogin to the non-global zone, everything works. Not sure if this is an outright bug, a misleading error message, or 100% user error.