Stardock Deskscapes interferes with VBox

[rwesterb]

I'm using Windows Vista x64 Ultimate as my host operating system. I have installed Ubuntu 8.04 as OS on my virtual machine. If I assign more than 300 MB (not really sure about the exact limit) of RAM to the virtual machine, I always end up with the following error message when I try to launch applications inside my guest OS:

"Unable to allocate and lock memory. The virtual machine will be paused. Please close applications to free up memory or close the VM.

Error ID: HostMemoryLow Severity: Non-Fatal Error"

These problems have occurred on both of the VirtualBox versions I have tried out, that is v. 1.6 and v. 1.6.2. My system has plenty of RAM, so that shouldn't be the problem. I have also tried several VM configuration options. My system briefly:

Windows Vista Ultimate x64 SP 1 Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 RAM 5 GB Nvidia 8800 GT

Please ask for log files if you need them!

[Sander van Leeuwen]

Can you attach the VBox.log of the session? I have never seen that on Vista64 and I tend to use at least 512 MB ram for my VMs.

[rwesterb]

This crash occurred immediately when I tried to launch the VM, check out the log for the information you need.

[rwesterb]

After playing around with different system settings I have come to an interesting conclusion. I usually run my Vista desktop with Dreamscene enabled (video background). However, with Dreamscene disabled I'm no longer able to reproduce the crashes, which else usually occur within a minute from startup.

With that said maybe I should mention that Stardock's Deskscapes is also installed on my desktop. Especially Deskscapes has proven useful when it comes to crashing the Nvidia drivers, don't now who to blame.

I disabled/enabled the Dreamscene several times, all with the same result: The VM crashes every time when Dreamscene was enabled, not a single crash when disabled. The only thing I did was to launch Eclipse and Open Office Word inside the VM.

I hope that this information may give you some clues. Guess I will have to manage without eye candy while I'm programming till you find a solution then :-)

[rwesterb]

Seems as this problem might have been Nvidia-specific. Since I installed my older Ati 2600XT GPU I havn't had any problems at all running VirtualBox.

[Sander van Leeuwen]

Try again with 2.0. The Qt4 GUI might behave differently. Reopen if required please.