Moving all core functionalities from the tray to the service -> not technically feasible

[Sworddragon]

On a Windows XP guest I'm seeing that with installed guest additions the processes VBoxService.exe (registered as service) and VBoxTray.exe (registered as autostart entry) are running. Normally I would expect that all core functionality would be available through the service and that the tray provides just informations, etc. But if I'm disabling the tray with msconfig I'm losing also functionality like access to the network drive that points to the shared folder and copy and paste between the host and the guest. So it would maybe make more sense to move all core functionalities to the service.

[Michael Thayer]

I'm afraid that would not work as you describe. VBoxService runs as a system service which cannot access the desktop of the logged in user, and VBoxTray runs as part of the user log-in session and does things which need access to that. By definition those things cannot be done by the service.

(Perhaps there is a way if someone were to spend enough time on it, but the importance is too low to justify the effort. For this particular issue we would probably not accept a user patch either, as it would be quite large and invasive and would need more review time from us than we could justify.)

[Sworddragon]

Replying to michael:

For this particular issue we would probably not accept a user patch either, as it would be quite large and invasive and would need more review time from us than we could justify.

Hm, this sounds as there are even not enough ressources to maintain VirtualBox in general as it would normally be needed. At least the project is Open Source and users could fork it/apply local patchsets on it. But probably this project should be given to somebody who has more ressources to maintain it (maybe the Apache Software Foundation?).