Windows Vista guest additions breaks login in guest

[Greg Davis]

After installing Guest Additions for Windows Vista in safe-mode as administrator, I reboot and try to log in as any user. I then see a spinning wheel of death and the words "Welcome," see attached screenshot. This also happened with 4.0.2 GA and I am pretty sure 4.0.0 as well. This behavior did not happen with 3.x.y GA, it showed up with 4.0. This happens for all of my Vista VMs, and also happens for VMs that I newly create with 4.x, as well as ones created with 3.x.

If start in safe mode, after installing the GA, I can log in no problem, I am just in safe mode and thus can't do anything useful. At that point in safe-mode, as screen resize and mouse capture don't work, I am thinking the VBox GA drivers are not even loaded.

I tried uninstalling VBox 4.0.2, rebooting the host, and installing latest 4.0.4 to see if there was something wrong with the installation, but same behavior after the newer installation.

The VBox log for the VM doesn't complain about anything blatent, so I don't know where to start tracking this down.

[Greg Davis]

welcome text screenshot

[Greg Davis]

Also tried uninstalling older, previously installed GA, rebooting guest, installing newer GA version. This still results in a spinning wheel of welcome. I was hoping that the issue was with upgrading a GA installed into a guest. Then again, the GA installer seems to work at least once in the same VM. Maybe the uninstaller is not cleaning files out properly, or Windows is un-uninstalling things.