I hesitate to even bring this up since my use case might be totally unacceptable, but I use PortableApps from my hard drive and run instances of it two VMs where I've mapped drives (shared folders in VirtualBox parlance). I get that there are some "collisions" associated with trying to start up a specific app at the same time from the two VMs (and live with that).
What is difficult to deal with, however, is that pretty much whenever I close my VM and save the machine state (i.e., have VirtualBox provide the equivalent of hibernation) and then bring the VM back up, PortableApps platform consistently throws an exception and has to be killed via TaskManager. If there are specific portables apps running, they tend to exhibit the same behavior. This behavior occurs both in a VM hosting Windows 7 64-bit and one hosting Windows Server 2003 32-bit.
My workaround is to always close all portable apps as well as the platform before I save/close each VM. Invariably, I forget and have to work through the multiple steps to get PortableApps restarted.
I've experienced this in platform versions going back to 10 and I'm currently using v12.0 Beta 3.2.
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Running in VirtualBox VM on "mapped drive"
July 30, 2014 - 9:19am
#1
Running in VirtualBox VM on "mapped drive"
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I'd wager that VirtualBox is disconnecting the shared folders before saving state and reconnecting them after it starts back up again. This is because they're treated as network drives which are (necessarily) outside of VirtualBox's control. In essence, it's the same as ripping the USB flash drive out of a PC with your apps running from it and then quickly putting it back in. The platform and any apps that monitor their hd state will all crash. Most will likely lose data as well.
Using it from a VM is fine. Running it from a shared folder is fine. Saving state in a VM while running from a shared folder is not.
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