Oracle VM VirtualBox makes use of the Microsoft Component Object Model (COM) for interprocess and intraprocess communication. This enables Oracle VM VirtualBox to share a common configuration among different virtual machine processes and provide several user interface options based on a common architecture. All global status information and configuration is maintained by the process VBoxSVC.exe, which is an out-of-process COM server. Whenever an Oracle VM VirtualBox process is started, it requests access to the COM server and Windows automatically starts the process. Note that it should never be started by the end user.

When the last process disconnects from the COM server, it will terminate itself after some seconds. The Oracle VM VirtualBox configuration XML files are maintained and owned by the COM server and the files are locked whenever the server runs.

In some cases, such as when a virtual machine is terminated unexpectedly, the COM server will not notice that the client is disconnected and stay active for a longer period of 10 minutes or so, keeping the configuration files locked. In other rare cases the COM server might experience an internal error and subsequently other processes fail to initialize it. In these situations, it is recommended to use the Windows task manager to kill the process VBoxSVC.exe.