Aero glass no longer works in Virtualbox 4.3.14

[NemesisIV]

After upgrading to VirtualBox 4.3.14, aero glass no longer works. I downgraded to 4.3.12, and amazingly it works!

[Tsso]

with 4.3.14 guest additions

[Tsso]

with 4.3.10 guest additions

[Tsso]

Confirmed on Vista 32 guest. In fact, the problem seems confined to the guest additions.

I upgraded my Win7 64 host to 4.3.14 from 4.3.12, then started a rarely-used Vista VM which still had the older 4.3.10 guest additions installed. I upgraded to the .14 additions, rebooted the guest, and Aero glass effects were turned off, and could not be re-enabled. the WINSAT utility ran, and seemed to pass, but would not trigger them to work again; DXDIAG simply said D3D enabled. I even recreated the entire VM, but Aero still would not work. Out of other troubleshooting options, I installed the old .10 guest additions over the .14, rebooted the guest, and Aero effects all worked as normal.

Attached logs from a .14 guest additions session, and then a .10.

[Frank Mehnert]

Any improvement with VBox 4.3.16? If not, could you attach a new VBox.log file? Thank you!

[Tsso]

Unfortunately, that does not fix Vista 32. In fact, it seems worse: after the GA installer is done, the guest screen resizes then goes completely black. The Preview pane in VirtualBox Manager shows a garbled, scrambled, colorful mess that changes randomly. The guest OS continues to run as normal (I presume) as I just hit Enter to trigger the installer's reboot button. After rebooting*, it was still black, but apparently running. I "hit the ACPI power button" and shut it down. Later, I restarted it and the display worked correctly, but with Aero vanished as usual. I then overwrote the GA with a .10 version I kept and, again, Aero turned back on after a reboot.

However, I have a Win7 32 VM which did not have the WDDM drivers installed. I configured its VM settings as required, booted it and installed the .16 GA, and after a reboot Aero glass was working fine. So, perhaps limited to Vista?

I made a Snapshot on each VM before these tests; hopefully that doesn't affect anything.

Attached are logs from the Vista 32 (fails) and the Win7 32 (works).

• (This customized Vista VM has a bug where rebooting from within the guest hangs before completing, requiring a reset. Shutdown works as normal. I could try a standard install in the future, if I can find the disc, but I don't think that's affecting the Aero issue.)

[Tsso]

working .16 additions

[UFOnseca]

Hello All,

I found a workaround to make Vista Aero Glass work under VirtualBox 4.3.16 r95972. What I did was to:

• Download VB 4.2.26-95022-Win from ​http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/4.2.26/VirtualBox-4.2.26-95022-Win.exe (as this was the latest Version in which Vista Aero Worked for me)
• Extract contents with 7-ZIP by right-clicking on the file and select "Extract To...".
• Once the .exe contents extracted, you will find the VBAdditions ISO Image (file_VBoxGuestAdditions.iso).
• Extract the ISO contents to a new folder
• Copy the VBAdditions Folder to your Vista VM (I copied it to my Desktop)
• Uninstall VM VirtualBox Guest Additions from Programs and Features in Control Panel
• Reboot your Vista VM
• From the VBAdditions Folder you previously copied, double-click on "VBoxWindowsAdditions.exe"
• Follow the on-screen instructions as with any other VB Additions Installation
• Reboot your Vista VM
• Voila!... Your Vista Aero Glass Theme is back!

[aeichner]

Please reopen if still relevant with a recent VirtualBox release.