WMI shows corrupt battery instance under Win32_Battery

[Jani]

Environment: Hardware: HP 6730b notebook VirtualBox 4.1.8 Windows 7 x86 host OS Windows XP SP3 guest OS

Symptom: When querying the Win32_Battery instance on the Windows guest, it shows a name containing messed up characters. This causes some WMI-based inventory programs to generate hard-to-parse output on virtual machines.

Expected behavior: Battery info should be built up of accurate, printable strings.

Fact:

• Guest OS language is irrelevant to the problem (tested on English and Hungarian XP).
• When rebooted the host device, the battery instance name has changed, but remained.
• The OS on the physical host shows correct battery info, the issue can be reproduced only in the virtual machines.
• Device manager on the guest shows standard data, no corrupted characters shown.
• The issue has been there in VirtualBox 3.2.6 or even older versions.

[Jani]

Output of WMI Explorer tool, showing the corrupt string

[Jani]

Device Manager showing battery info

[aeichner]

Please reopen if still relevant with a recent VirtualBox release.