VB-3.1.6 crash with win-7 64b host ubuntu-10.04 32b guest + additions

[simon marshall]

I built a new ubuntu-10.04 32b guest on my win7 64b host with 3d enabled. Everything seemed ok with the guest, so I installed the GA and rebooted. (That VB allows support for full desktop effects is pretty impressive!) Unfortunately, 2 immediate problems became evident:

1 - the guest can no longer see the network 2 - shutting down the guest causes VB itself to crash

These problems are reproducible, and I have a snapshot of the machine immediately after shutting down following installing GA (ie, without rebooting).

If I reboot the guest snapshot and then shutdown from within the guest (without doing anything else in the guest except wait for it to say it cannot see the network), I get a popup "VirtualBox GUI has stopped working" and in the VB GUI itself the state of the machine is "Aborted".

[simon marshall]

I have also found:

3 - VB crashes if I change guest Visual Effects to None

4 - VB crashes if I leave Visual Effects as default (ie, Normal) but change the Screensaver to one of AntSpotlight, GLBlur, GLCells, GLMatrix, GLSchool, GLSlideshow, GLText or Hypertorus. That is, pretty much any of the screensavers.

5 - If I disable 3D Acceleration for the VM then VB does not crash for (2) and (4), though for (1) the guest still cannot see the internet. (Note that (3) does not apply as it is the default if 3D Acceleration is disabled.)

Bizarrely, typing in this ticket comment window under Firefox in the host when the "VirtualBox GUI has stopped working" popup is visible becomes painfully slow.

[simon marshall]

For (1), the guest network failure following guest additions, I have have opened a separate ticket ​http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/6656.

How can I help debug this? What other information do you need?

[simon marshall]

I can also confirm that the VB crashes occur for a ubuntu-10.04 64b guest.

[simon marshall]

I think I have solved the crashing part of the problem. My host drivers were up-to-date as far as Windows was concerned, but I went directly to Intel and found my Graphics Driver was out-of-date (8.15.0010.2082 vs 8.15.10.2104). I thought that would be covered by Windows update, but presumably not. Updating that (and Intel Chipset Software Installation Utility) seems to have solved the problem.

So, I think this ticket can be closed, sorry for the wasted bandwidth. If I see any problems I'll raise a new one.