I think I’m getting there, slowly but surely. After my last post, the Virtualbox host hung when my XP VM was under very heavy CPU and IO load. It was at this point I realised I still had the old 4 port SATA controller in the box, even though it was my prime suspect for the issues that lead me to building this box to start with.

I’ve now removed the old SATA controller, and given the XP VM a good CPU/IO thrashing. No crash.

These issues have been dragging on since October/November last year. I must be getting to the end of them by now surely. Too bad if I don’t I guess. I can’t bring myself to migrate my personal mail from a VM to Google, nor to host it anywhere else outside of my control. I either have to get this working in a stable, reliable manner. Or I need to take off my tinfoil hat and stop micro managing email.

I’m aiming for the former, but as these issues keep popping up I’m starting to think the latter is more likely.