Roger Mills wrote:
I have a Virtual XP setup for running a few legacy programs which won't
run on W7-64bit. It's on a laptop running W7-PRO 64.

It's been ok for several years, but today it won't start. It puts up the
usual little window saying "Starting Virtual Machine" and the progress
marker starts moving to the right and when it's got about one third of
the way across after about 40 seconds, the window closes - and that's
that. No error messages or anything. At the point when it closes, I
would expect it to say "Starting integration functions" - or something
like that - but it doesn't.

I've re-booted numerous times to no avail. Malwarebytes doesn't find
anything amiss.

Anyone got any suggestions what to try next?

TIA.

I had a chance to set it up again (WinXP Mode on Win7 Pro).

One setting in there, which is not enabled by default, is Undo Disks.
In theory, that would allow you to back out the changes in the last session.
At this point, I don't think that's too important.

https://s12.postimg.org/u8m1hzf6l/default.gif

Presumably "Undo Disks" is a machine-side instance of Differencing Disks.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/...=ws.10%29.aspx

When installed, I see the following.

There is

Windows XP Mode.vmcx (in Virtual Machines)

These are in the folder I uses to store the main VM files.

Windows XP Mode.vhd (main disk)
Windows XP Mode.vmc (control)
Windows XP Mode.vmc.vpcbackup (differencing disk??? not used)

"Integration features"
Windows XP Mode.vsv (2,181,038,080 bytes) (on a 2048MB WinXP VM)

The Integration Features seems to scale with the size of the VM memory
setting, implying it's an outboard hiberfile. In the thread here,
somebody deletes this, to get their machine to start again.

https://social.technet.microsoft.com...um=w7itprovirt

The machine is set up to hibernate at the drop of a hat.
And having the hibernation facility outside the machine,
may work faster with the disk drive, than going through
the disk driver in the WinXP Guest. That's my guess as to
why they may have done it that way.

The VPC2007 doesn't have these features, which is why these
didn't come to mind when answering the question the first time.
And if Differencing Disks were enabled for any reason, it
might make the handling of the VM externally (outside
Windows Virtual PC) a lot tougher, for repair purposes.

I'm continuing to test mine at the moment, by blasting in
some Windows Updates.

One thing I notice, is the Terminal Services rendering of the
desktop, works in "fits and starts". If I move the mouse
pointer around in the VM, the stream of events flying into
Terminal Services, keeps the graphical rendering running.
If I stop moving the mouse, and I have the Clock open
in the WinXP Guest, the second hand won't update. If you
then move the mouse, the second hald will "zip around" 20 seconds
worth in one blast. So for some reason, on my Win7Pro setup,
it isn't smooth at all. And the CPU has plenty of horsepower,
and the VM environment only emulates a single core, so the
Guest cannot hog the resources in any practical way.

Summary: Delete the .vsv and retry... You're deleting the
hiberfile when doing that, and Windows could (worst case)
need to tidy up on the next run, using CHKDSK.

Paul