Linux guest in MacOS host has strange refresh behavior after installing Guest Additions

[Chi Mak]

I am running Ubuntu (32-bit) inside a Mac OS X host. I upgraded to 4.0.4 from 3.2.12 without installing the new Guest Additions, everything has been running fine.

I just installed the new Guest Additions for 4.0.4. After the install, there seemed to be a strange refresh problem wheneve I invoke 3d graphics. In Pymol (a molecular graphics application), it refreshed the graphics window every time any keyboard or mouse input was made and did it extremely slowly. This didn't happen with the old 3.2.12 Guest Additions running inside 4.0.4. Because I can't reinstall the old Guest Additions, I had to regress to Vbox 3.2.12.

[Chi Mak]

Pymol gave the following error:

OpenGL Warning: No pincher, please call crStateSetCurrentPointers() in your SPU

[Chi Mak]

After some additional investigation, I found out that regressing to vbox versions 3.2.12 or 3.2.10 and their corresponding Guest Additions did not resolve the problem. Going back farther to 3.2.8 or before resulted in a crash instead. It appears that the 3D support required by Pymol was never properly functional in vbox version 3.2.8 or earlier. Using Guest Additions from <= 3.2.8, in vobx version >= 3.2.10 caused Pymol to revert to software rendering (mesa), and no error was reported. So the OpenGL support in 3.2.10 or later have improved, but still not working.

Pymol uses 3D routines from Chromium, which presumably is the source of the error message above.