7. Known issues and problems with Virtual PC 2004
Filed By: Robert Moir
7. Known issues and problems with Virtual PC 2004
Here I'm going to try and record all the details of problems that are shown up by the Virtual PC 2004 community, together with any known work arounds and of course details of any bug fixes or patches.
Note that this is going to be a list of problems VPC has doing the things it is supposed to be able to do, not a list of "Wouldn't it be cool if..." things.
7.1. I'm using a recent AMD Processor and I keep having host and / or guest machine crashes.
This is a known bug and Microsoft are working on a fix. The official knowledge base article outlining the problem and a fix is here.
October 2004 update:
This fix is included in Virtual PC 2004 Service Pack 1
June 2004 update:
The 'official' solution is to call your local number for Microsoft Product Support Services and ask for hotfix number "Q833506", explaining that you are experiencing the symptoms outlined in the related knowledgebase article.
Steve Jain, Microsoft MVP for Virtual PC, has a "hack" that should work (requires the 45 day trial)
Copy the VMM.SYS from the trial install into the full installer. However, the VMM.SYS is installed as a driver so you can't just copy over the top of it once it is installed, so you need to copy the full install bits to a temp location, then copy over the vmm.sys file from the trial and then do a normal install from the modified full version.
7.2. I'm having trouble accessing some menu options using the ALT key in the guest machine.
Some keyboards have problems with this when the Virtual PC host key clashes with a key thats normally used for a keyboard combination in the guest machine.
To fix this, simply change the host key, as follows:
7.3. I'm having problems getting the Windowing system to work in my copy of Linux/Unix.
Remember that a Virtual PC emulates different devices from those installed in your host machine, so you should be installing drivers for the S3 Trio it emulates for video, not the drivers for the card in your physical machine. Also, you can try the generic VESA 2.0 video card drivers if present, and these may actually work better than the S3 Trio ones!
Additionally, and most importantly, the installer may identify the card correctly and then suggest 24bit Colour. This will certainly not work; change this for 32bit colour or 16bit colour.
I'm grouping these questions together for now as they appear related at the moment. Should that change, I'll split them up.
First thing to check is, are you using up to date drivers for your host computer's network card. Even if you think your drivers "Should be reasonably up to date", please double-check this is the case.
[18/01/04 update] Martin Moustgaard quite rightly points out the following: Perhaps you should emphasize that up to date means downloading the latest drivers from Intel (or whoever your NIC manufacturer is) and not from Microsoft's Windows update. As far as I know the NIC drivers from Windows update doesn't expose the offload parameters. Thanks Martin!
Remember that neither myself, Martin, nor anyone else is responsible for any problems that might arise from installing drivers from anywhere other than Windows Update.
Next thing, and this appears to be a big factor for people using Intel network cards (often found onboard various motherboards), is to go into the driver settings for the network card and look for a setting called offloading. If its there, disable it.
To disable Offloading on the host PC (note this assumes you are using XP Pro, all other hosts should be similar enough):
Consider yourself warned about installing drivers and changing options in this dialogue possibly having unintended side-affects, etc, etc. I assume no responsibility if this makes your problems worse, not better.
7.5. Performance sucks. It is taking HOURS to install an operating system here!
Read the FAQ section on performance.
I'm afraid VPC probably won't be able to help you much. It only talks to the "virtual" hardware that it emulates, and can't do much with cards plugged into the physical system's motherboard. Certainly, if the host OS can't talk to it, then guests certainly won't be able to.
7.7. You know this one time, I was installing Longhorn and it...
Right. Longhorn is not even beta software at the time I write this. It does work on VPC 2004, it does take forever to install, and it does perform so badly afterwards you'll wonder why you bothered.
However, see FAQ pt 3, section a, question 3 and also FAQ pt 5, question 3. And Jonathan's site has a note on Longhorn too.
7.8. I'm having problems using DVDs with my Virtual PC.
Virtual PC 2004 currently only supports disk sizes up to 2.2 Gb. One workaround which I've seen, but not tested myself, is to use virtual CD software to mount the ISO image as a virtual CD, then connect Virtual PC to the drive letter your virtual CD is using as if it were a normal CD/DVD drive.
Jeroen Pluimers has posted some more information about this in the forums and suggesting that the DVD size limit breaks at the 31-bit barrier which should explain things perfectly to all the programmers and hackers amoung us. Also some work arounds posted there so well worth a look.
Workaround from Jeroen's post:
The workaround of mounting the DVD ISO image as a virtual drive in the host OS, then redirecting that drive form the VPC CD-ROM drive to the virtual host drive seems to work fine. I have successfully tested this workaround with the following virtual CD drivers:
1. Microsoft Virtual CD Control Panel 2.1:
2. Daemon tools 3.46
http://my.so-net.net.tw/martinx/dtools/dt346.exe
3. Nero ImageDrive 2.23 (this ships with the Nero 5.5.10.56 which I have installed)
Thanks Jeroen!
Solution:
(a) If MSXML4 is really not registered, then you can register it using the command: regsvr32 mxsml4.dll
(b) This error also occurs when there is a problem with Options.xml. Rename the Options.xml file in the folder %userprofile%\Application Data\Microsoft\Virtual PC Trial and then start Virtual PC again. (It will generate a new one.)
[contributed by Steve Rose]
Raxco's PerfectDisk seems to work. It defragged the whole drive the VPC files were on, so thats good enough for me..
PerfectDisk did suggest both an online and offline pass over the disk, and as I had nothing else to do, I said yes. It took a while but it got there in the end and it ran just fine.
[question contributed by Steve Rose, answer by Rob]
7.11. Installshield errors prevent setup from running when installing Virtual PC.
Symptoms... Installation of Virtual PC halts with the following error:
"1: The InstallScript engine is missing from this machine. If available, please run ISScript.msi, or contact your support personnel for further assistance."
This is a common error affecting several products that use installshield and reflects a problem with how installshield on your machine is behaving rather than the particular product you have which wants to use it for the installation.
The following site helps you figure out which version of the installshield pieces you need when these situations arise, and links to them - http://consumer.installshield.com/kb.asp?id=Q108322.
In our case, the setup launcher is v8.1.160.0, so you use the v8 - worked for me.
[Answers from Steve Rose, and Rob]
