I use Virtualbox on Windows 7 to easily switch between Windows, Ubuntu and Mac. I am dual-booting Ubuntu and Windows, but it is just a hassle to reboot to work in another system, VirtualBox is just very convenient.
The other day VirtualBox decided to stop working. Great. Game over man, game over.
In the title of the error dialog I read “Error in supR3HardenedWinReSpawn“
In the message: “Error relaunching VirtualBox VM process: 5“…
Some reported that the Anti Virus program is at fault and by simply removing it should solve the problem. Well,
I need my AntiVirus program, so that solution is out of the question, but I could try to temporary disable it, to see
what happens.
Here is a good explanation as to why the Anti Virus program has anything to do this with at all
The problem is not the virus scanning engine but the habit of virus scanners to map certain DLLs into Windows processes.
VirtualBox 4.3.14 has extended hardening features which may conflict with virus scanners. We did several tests but obviously didn’t catch every case. The final 4.3.14 release contains more fixes in this regards but I’ve read in other topics that certain users have still problems 🙁
-Frank Mehnert at the virtualbox forums
Additionally, I use the “USB 2.0 extension pack”, because the Mac OS requires this, the virtual machine cannot
recognize the keyboard, which is interesting since it is an Apple keyboard.
During all this trial and error I tried rebooting the computer after rolling back to earlier versions. I went from 4.3.18 to 4.3.16. I also tried 4.2.26, that didn’t work either. I tried disabling my anti virus (AVG Internet Security). I even excluded the Oracle directory from the scanner. I doubt that actually did anything though.
For some users of the VirtualBox forum, downgrading to version 4.3.12 could actually do the trick.
So I tried it and installed the USB 2.0 extension pack and it works. Hopefully this will work for you to.
Download VirtualBox 4.3.12:
https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Download_Old_Builds_4_3
The extension pack (if you need it) is also there.
