When RDP to VM is terminated badly - VM still holds RDP session open

[Adrian]

Now my Vista machine is a piece on junk and likes to lock up. So it needs cold rebooting. The problem is that the vrdp tcp connection stays established on the Linux machine even after rebooting the vista machine. So I cannot reconnect back to my running VM and also have not been able to force it to disconnect. I've tried below with no success.

VBoxMange controlvm winxp_work vrdp  off
VBoxMange controlvm winxp_work vrdp  on

I see from netstat that the VM still thinks there is a RDP session established. Even when the keepalive timer times out - it just resets rather then closing the connection. Occasionally if I wait long enough - I can reconnect - but we are talking 15min plus.

Some details:

1. Virtual Box installed (3.2.8r64453) on 64bit Linux host (amd64 all distro version).
2. Win XP 32 bit guest installed with latest Virtual Box tools.
3. VM started with "VBoxHeadless -s winxp_work &"
4. VBoxHeadless disown'ed from bash to stop it killing it if I close shell
5. Access VM from Vista 64 via remote desktop
6. Linux iceweasel 2.6.30.4-2 #7 SMP Tue Aug 11 17:12:39 MDT 2009 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
7. Using a bridged interface

Does anyone have any ideas how I can convince the VM that the RDP session is over - or maybe I need to change some global tcp settings somewhere?

iceweasel:~ # netstat -ntap | grep VB
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:3389            0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      26054/VBoxHeadless
tcp        0  49850 192.168.124.7:3389      192.168.124.3:1116      ESTABLISHED 26054/VBoxHeadless
iceweasel:~ # netstat -ntap --timer
Active Internet connections (servers and established)
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address           Foreign Address         State       PID/Program name    Timer
...
tcp        0  49850 192.168.124.7:3389      192.168.124.3:1116      ESTABLISHED 26054/VBoxHeadless  on (95.16/9/0)

[Adrian]

Machine XML config

[Adrian]

Log file of it happening

[Adrian]

2nd Log file of it happening

[Adrian]

I had enabled multiple RDP connection. This did not help as I only got a blank screen on subsequent reconnections. 1 time I actually got to see VM desktop but nothing worked. After that all subsequent RDP connection failed. Netstat showed same problem with a non-existent established connection. I even tried adding iptables rules to drop all packets for that connection.

I have since modified my tcp keep alive settings to see if this helps on next occurrence.

net.ipv4.tcp_keepalive_time = 60
net.ipv4.tcp_keepalive_probes = 9
net.ipv4.tcp_keepalive_intvl = 10