Make Close/shutdown radio button options and default selection user configurable

[Mark Cranness]

When you Close a VM a dialog appears with options to Save state, ACPI Power button, Power off, with sub-option of Restore Current Snapshot.

Once one of the options is selected, it is remembered and will be the default used next time Close is used.

This default selection has caused people to lose work, when they do not expect the default value to be used.

Typically, a user may select Power down and Restore Current Snapshot once (which selects that option as the default value). Then for some weeks they shutdown the VM using the normal guest OS shutdown commands, then weeks later use the Close feature but not check carefully enough the now default option and lose data.

Could some user configurability be added to the options, such as to set an explicit default value from the Settings dialog, or VirtualBox-wide setup options?

If the user sets an explicit default value (or an explicit "no default" value), then that default value is always used and any changed option selected when the dialog is used is forgotten: The configured default value is always used.

[Sander van Leeuwen]

I don't really see the reason for adding even more configurable options here. There are always confirmation dialogs that ask for permission before doing something that can't be undone.

Adding some obscure option to change the default shutdown behaviour isn't likely to help here imho.

[Mark Cranness]

By default the UI saves the last choice made in the Close dialog. If this could be turned off (so that no default selection was stored or made) that would be useful and help prevent user mistakes.

Add a checkbox to the bottom of the page: 'Remember this choice for next time'.

The user can then un-check the checkbox and be forced to specify manually what they want to do everytime they close.

[Frank Mehnert]

As VBox 3.2.0 a VM can be configured to disable certain actions in the shutdown dialog. See ​here for more information. The shipped manual doesn't contain this information yet, this will be fixed in the next maintenance release.

[Frank Mehnert]

VBox 3.2.6 contains the documentation.