Problems with Intelppm.sys and processr.sys under Virtual PC / Virtual Server

Under certain circumstances with a Windows XP / 2003 operating system - intelppm.sys and processr.sys can cause a virtual machine running under Virtual PC / Virtual Server to crash (by default this will cause the Windows guest operating system to reboot automatically - but if you have changed this setting you will see a blue screen).  The reason for this crash is because these drivers are attempting to perform an unsupported operation inside of the virtual machine (like upgrading the physical processors microcode, changing power state on the physical processor).

Today this problem only occurs on Centrino and AMD K8 processors.  Most people see this problem when they move a virtual machine that was created on another type of processor to a computer running one of these types of processors (and then they usually see the problem when they attempt to shutdown their virtual machine for the first time).  Now you may be wondering why you have not heard about this problem more often - and the reason for that is that if these drivers fail once - they are smart enough to not attempt to perform the operation that failed again.

If you are seeing this problem repeatedly you can manually disable these drivers (with no negative side effect) by going to the following location in the registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesProcessor

Or

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesIntelppm

And changing the 'Start' value to '4'.

In the mean time we have made some subtle changes to the way our hardware exposes the processor in Virtual Server R2 so that in future products these drivers should never get loaded inside of virtual machines.

Cheers,
Ben

Comments

• Anonymous
  October 24, 2005
  this might help mysterious reboots that I get (daily it seems) from my 2003server guest (XP host).
  
  so do we change the host or guest registery?

• Anonymous
  October 24, 2005
  Sorry for not being clear there - you make the change in the guest registry.
  
  Cheers,
  Ben

• Anonymous
  October 25, 2005
  So that's why VirtualPC doesn't work right on my (Centrino) laptop!
  
  Also, rather than wondering around in the registry, you're better off using "SC" command (included with Windows XP/2003), like this:
  sc config processor start= disabled
  sc config intelppm start= disabled
  This is in the guest OS, of course.

• Anonymous
  October 27, 2005
  Thanx, Ben & Jonathan. We just slammed into this issue with one of our [Avanade's] clients, but it's going the other way from what you described. A W2k3 image created and sysprep-ed on a Centrino notebook tanked when run on a desktop P4 w/ HT... The processor service couldn't be found on the image, but the "sc config intelppm start= disabled" cured it AFTER I copied the image to the P4 BEFORE running sysprep. Thank you!! Note that it didn't work when I disabled intelppm and sysprep-ed on the Centrino and then tried to run it on the PCs...

• Anonymous
  November 04, 2005
  Ben,
  
  FYI, I have the problem consistently on my DELL XPS Gen 4 (Intel P4 3.6 GHz, hyperthreading on) running Windows XP Media Center 2005.
  
  Cheers,
  
  Brian

• Anonymous
  November 15, 2005
  Note: I had to use the SC commands at a Safe Mode with Command Prompt because my VPC Instance couldn't even login without blue screening. After applying the two changes in Safe mode everything works fine.

• Anonymous
  June 08, 2010
  This article was realy useful to me. To prevent to spend so much time to reintalling again all stuffs... Thanks

• Anonymous
  June 27, 2010
  Thank you too much, Thats works really good Francisco, from Argentina

• Anonymous
  June 27, 2010
  That's for the heads up on this. Just as a note though. I had to start the guest machine in safe mode so the registry entry I had to change wasn't "...CurrentControlSet..." but was "...ControlSet002..."

• Anonymous
  July 05, 2010
  Thank you, thank you, thank you! Even here in 2010 this has brought my Sun VirtualBox back to life!

• Anonymous
  July 28, 2010
  Champion! Solved my problems. Moving a Guest XP 32bit from a 64bit Mandriva system to: a 32bit Linux Mint host. All on VirtualBox. Thank you!

• Anonymous
  August 12, 2010
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  September 22, 2010
  Thank you,Thank you,Thank you,Thank you,Thank you,Thank you,Thank you,Thank you,Thank you,Thank you,Thank you,Thank you,Thank you,Thank you,Thank you,Thank you!!!!!!

• Anonymous
  October 10, 2010
  Thanks a million, Ben. You have just solved my problem.

• Anonymous
  October 14, 2010
  Thanks a lot! You have saved my day!

• Anonymous
  October 16, 2010
  Thanks for this very useful tip.  It's still a problem in October 2010.  With your help I have successfully imported a virtual machine from my AMD based desktop to my Intel based Thinkpad.  I had begun to think I was going to have to rebuild it completely.  This has saved me hours of time.  Thank you again.

• Anonymous
  October 30, 2010
  I migrated a virtual XP machine from one Intel machine to another lower end Intel machine. I tried intelppm.sys start value to four but no luck so i placed both processor and intelppm.sys start values to four and it worked. Thanks for the post and your help this was a life saver.

• Anonymous
  November 10, 2010
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  November 22, 2010
  Thanks man! It was really helped me! The problem appeared when I updated VirtualBox to v 3.2.1. I spent whole day for that, and only your decision really helped.

• Anonymous
  November 26, 2010
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  December 13, 2010
  Ben, thanks for the post. I had exactly this problem with VirtualBox 3.2.12, Fedora Core 12 host on my Thinkpad X301 (Interl Centrino 2), WinXp Pro SP3 guest. Your workarounf did the trick. The driver in my case was Intelppm. Strange that the problem still persists five years after your post... Anyway, you saved me the day. Thanks a lot!!! Igor

• Anonymous
  February 15, 2011
  thank you very much,that's so good!!

• Anonymous
  March 06, 2011
  All these years later and this post still helped me out with an issue I was having tonight. Thank you very much!

• Anonymous
  April 14, 2011
  Thanks, you saved me a lot of time (preventing from installing new Windows OS) Thanks Martin

• Anonymous
  August 07, 2011
  well. I disabled through registry as you and said but i get the same error blue screen. I even tried to remove vdi image and changed evry settings control and nothing helps :( I even reinstalled xp and installed original microsoft xp and nothing helped. so how do you fix this i have crossed all google pages but nothing can help me. So do not understand what's going on here. This is first time when this happens.

• Anonymous
  September 20, 2011
  Incredible, 6 years later It works! I'm executing a Windows 7 64bits host and a XP as guest OS. Thank you!

• Anonymous
  December 02, 2011
  Thank you very much, I have been trying to figure this out all day, thank you.

• Anonymous
  March 03, 2012
  Hi, I tried to move a Virtualbox VM from an AMD processor to an INTEL and I had this problem 0x000000CE Maybe should I fix another key? maybe an AMD key?? Thanks!

• Anonymous
  April 26, 2012
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  June 03, 2012
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  June 10, 2012
  WOW... :D :D Seven years later it still helps :D :D :D

• Anonymous
  November 05, 2012
  Thank you . thank you... thank you.... =D it was helpfull

• Anonymous
  November 16, 2012
  You're awesome... i have suffered a lot when i changed from an AMD host to an Intel .... so thanks!!

• Anonymous
  February 17, 2013
  but I cann't found the two keys in my windows?

• Anonymous
  May 02, 2013
  Thank you!! I create the virtual machine in an AMD-desktop, and moving to an Intel-laptop brought me to the BSoD... now I've solved!! :D

• Anonymous
  August 13, 2013
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  December 01, 2013
  Thank you. This was exactly what was needed. I thought I lost my entire development environment today after the latest Vbox update made this old error come back.

• Anonymous
  January 25, 2014
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  March 19, 2014
  My virtualbox was freakinme out! But, man... I LOVE YOU. LOL

• Anonymous
  August 13, 2014
  Thank you, from me to! Solved my problems with XP today.

• Anonymous
  September 05, 2014
  Thank you, worked like a charm for winXp virtualBox's guest during migration on different cpu architecture) Maybe this blog post is eternal?)

• Anonymous
  September 24, 2014
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  March 08, 2015
  I was having similar issues for Physical Server which has installed windows 2003 32bit version, but strange thing when I uninstalled Mcafee, the issue is fixed Regards Lawrence T

• Anonymous
  July 12, 2015
  I've encountered this problem after migrated my xp's virtual machine running on Ubuntu with Xeon processor to a machine with centrino on both windows seven and ubuntu host's. I've solved the issue thanks to your detailed explanation. I'm very agreeded to you,!! Thanks a lot from Spain!

• Anonymous
  September 12, 2015
  thanks a lot, this issue appeared after upgrading to Win10 host, and was still present with virtualbox 5.0.4

• Anonymous
  October 04, 2015
  This problem just came up with VirtualBox 5.04 on a Windows 10 host. Your suggestion solved the issue, thank you.

• Anonymous
  April 21, 2016
  Yes, it worked! Windows XP on Ubuntu Host!

• Anonymous
  July 19, 2016
  Gracias, Thanks, Thanks very much, Re-Thanks. Sos grande!!!! como Maradona!!!

• Anonymous
  December 16, 2016
  This problem was occurred with me some days ago.This article is the solution.Thx

• Anonymous
  January 11, 2017
  Guys, I have similar issue with the windows server 2008 SP2, Could you please let me know if changing the start value will have any impact to the server.

• Anonymous
  August 04, 2017
  I faced the same problem after migrating a virtualbox WinXP guest from my old computer to a new one (both hosts are Win7 Pro). The solution didn't work for me.But I disabled the "crusoe" processor also, and now it's ok. It's very interesting, because I didn't ever use the Transmeta Crosoe processor :)

• Anonymous
  November 17, 2017
  12 years later and it helped me! thanks!