VirtualBox services not starting, consuming CPU cycles with no output or action

[Novometa]

Ahoy! We're hoping to switch over to VirtualBox from VMWare.

We're running 3.0.2-49928 on kernel 2.6.29-4 (Novometa distribution).

Installation seems fine; kernel modules build and load.

Basically, services don't start. Turning on tracing in the main Vbox.sh script we can see it's attempting to exec /opt/VirtualBox/Virtualbox.

For some reason, this binary (and other such as VboxManage, VBoxHeadless and of course VBoxSVC) sit there consuming CPU cycles indefinitely; one cannot even run a version query.

Nothing gets syslogged, and there are no kernel messages. No IP packets observed in or out.

1050 pts/1 RN 10:50 /opt/VirtualBox/VirtualBox -v

It continues to burn CPU time without doing anything I can see.

There's nothing in /tmp and no ~/.VirtualBox created either.

If kernel modules are unloaded, the behavior is the same (with the exception of a the expected complaint) – it still sits there consuming CPU cycles without doing anything I can observe.

My suspicion is that it's related to IPC?