Oracle Virtual Box 4.3.14 Update Travails!

On my home system I run the following virtualization software packages.

• Microsoft Windows Virtual PC (not so much actively any longer, but it’s still loaded)
• Oracle’s Virtual Box platform
• VMware’s VMware Player
• MobaLiveCD - (Qemu)

So when I saw that Oracle had released a new version of their Virtual Box (4.3.14) that had some nice new features, I naturally went on and applied the update.

VirtualBox 4.3.14 adds Blu-ray support for Mac hosts, squashes more bugs - BetaNews

However, it crashed on relaunch once the updating was done. Never even loaded the VM management console.

I uninstalled/repaired/reloaded multiple times, disabled all kinds of security layer software. No luck.

After about 2 hours of wasted troubleshooting time I bailed and decided to come back a few days later.

That session began with some web-searching and guess what? This build has all kinds of issues!

Failed to verify process integrity (rc=-5640) - virtualbox.org forums (what my error looked like)

Windows hardening in version 4.3.14 - virtualbox.org forums. From that link:

As of version 4.3.14, VirtualBox for Windows has hardened security to eliminate a possible exploit that could allow malicious user/s to have access to your system. This has triggered an issue where some Windows users can not install or run their guests. At this time it seems to be 3rd party apps that are causing this, like virus scanners and sandboxing software.

4.3.14 conflicts with anti-virus packages - virtualbox.org forums. This is the main issue discussion and monitoring thread.

At the time of this blog post, Oracle has release a tweaked version 4.3.15 (build 95286). See the thread link above for the URL as it may update again and that should provide the most current download package available.

In my case, I had to roll back to my previous 4.3.12 r93733 build and all my Virtual Box VM’s are running just fine like before. So I’m waiting until the FINAL fix is provided before redoing this again.

• VirtualBox older builds - Oracle Virtual Box (virtualbox.org)
• Oracle VM VirtualBox - Oracle Technology Network (alternative download location)

In related VM linkage, here are some more tidbits you might find useful:

• The Power User's Guide to Better Virtual Machines in VirtualBox - Lifehacker
• Ultimate VirtualBox Lab: Introduction to Building a Virtual Server — PC-Addicts
• Compacting Virtual Machines (VirtualBox and VMWare) - Paul Lockwood on Software Development

And, you would know, VMware also released an update to their VMware Player (version 6.0.3)

• Download VMware Player 6.0 - VMware
• VMware Player 6.0.3 Release Notes - VMware

Unlike Oracle’s package, this one went on and ran with no issues at all.

At least there’s that…

Cheers!

--Claus V.