Windows 7: Virtual PC Beta Causing BSOD

When I shut down my VPC at the end of the day after a good few hours use, it causes a BSOD of the laptop reboots.

The error is something along the lines of "An application attempted to release a resource that did not belong to it", that isn't the exact phrase but something very close to it.



Edit: It's done this a few times now, the second it's finished shutting down. One thing I have also noticed is that I can't shut it down correctly too, it informs me that the VPC is locked. So I have to shut down via the task manager, maybe this is what is causing the problem?

What happens when you just hibernate the VM or just close it?

I shall give it a go in a couple of hours when I finish working and let you know, I daren't do it just now as I had to do a full chkdsk yesterday after the BSOD f*cked with the hard drive.

Well, oddly enough I told it to Hibernate and it started doing it, then told me that it couldn't complete because an operation was already in progress. The VPC had disappeared so I went into the Virtual Machines folder and there it was "Powered down".

So it powered down and didn't Hibernate. On the plus side it didn't BSOD my laptop!

OK, so you cannot manually power off the VPC b/c of some sort of error - what exactly is that error?

Also, when you force the VPC off via the task manager, you're not allowing it to close, among other things, its NAT shared network connections - that will almost always give you a BSOD (as the same thing has happened to me from both VMWare Workstation 6.5 Beta as well as Virtual Box).

So, when you told the Virtual machine to hibernate, it hibernated successfully, or it actually *powered* off instead of hibernating? Or did you tell your *host* machine to hibernate?

Hi there,

Unless I intentionally causing it to blue screen, which I'm not willing to do as it's a works laptop and the hard drive doesn't like that kind of treatment, I shall I have to just refer to my original description of the message which was related to resources being released that did not belong to the application causing the BSOD.

"The error is something along the lines of "An application attempted to release a resource that did not belong to it", that isn't the exact phrase but something very close to it."

I don't use shared NAT I just use the network interface that the laptop is using, typicall WiFi, but occasionally I will use LAN. I have disabled the one I'm not using.

You're saying "force the VPC off via task manager"? Can you please reinterate on this a little, I'm referring to the "Shut Down" options in task manager which correctly log the user off, shuts down services, then windows etc. This is just the same as shutting down from the start menu with the exception that it actually works. At the moment Virtual PC is under the impression that my PC is permanently locked so refuses to shutdown via the "Action" menu.

I'm not entirely certain you should be comparing the app to VMWare and VirtualBox but I understand what you're saying. The previous incarnation of Virtual PC worked fine under these circumstances.

I am about to start rebuilding a VM from scratch using the beta to see if that helps matters.

Nick.

I'm giving up on this beta. It's painfully slow!

I just created a brand new VM, and I can hardly move the mouse about the screen.

That's on a Dell Inspiron 9400, 2gb RAM, Core 2 Duo 2ghz. Windows 7 32bit host.

Back to Virtual PC 2005 it is then!

Get this for odd behaviour, I'm on the initial menus after installing XP Pro, the ones with the music. It's stopping and starting and the mouse is extremely sluggish, but, I've just managed to make it slightly less sluggish by taking the cursor back to the host and popping up the system information so I could write down the spec for you above.

It's just not allocating enough time, simple as that.

your machine may have too many other things already running - plus, it might have a slower HD (IDE< possibly as slow as 4200 rpms) and / or your video card might be using a significant chunk of memory for Video memory.....

Or any one of a number of other things....

My original questions were due to the fact that I cannot differentiate if your are trying the shutdown procedure in the Virtual machine or on the host OS itself....

Nope to all of the above, my machine is fine I can guarantee that, Virtual PC 2007 works fine. The machine is freshly built with Windows 7, less than a week and has hardly anything installed other than Microsoft Office. The hard drive is fine too as I've been running Virtual Machines off of it for a number of years now. Memory is fine also.

The shutdown procedure was being done in the virtual machine of course.

Sorry I best add that I'm a professional software engineer as you seem to be going by the assumption that I'm a casual computer user. It's not working correctly, and as I mentioned in my last post, I'm going to stop using it as it can't even build a fresh one, whereas Virtual PC 2007 can do it just fine, with Hardware Virtualisation enabled.

Cheers anyway, I'll just wait until it's been in development a little longer before I give it another go, nice idea but typical MS beta stuff at the moment.

No worries - you didn't identify yourself as a professional, so I had no way of knowing - so I assumed (and erred).

Seeing the number of posts about the Beta VPC being goofy, I'd say that you're assumptions are correct - it simply is not working correctly.

I say chuck it and go with VirtualBox....