Wednesday, April 3, 2019

VirtualBox unable to start error: rc=-5640


If you see this error when trying to run a guest machine in VirtualBox:

(rc=-5640)
Please try reinstalling VirtualBox.
where: supR3HardenedWinReSpawn what: 1
VERR_SUP_VP_THREAD_NOT_ALONE (-5640) - Process Verification Failure: The process has more than one thread.


It seems that the program is not correctly parsing the memory holding the count of the threads. If you try several times, you may start the VM successfully but the chance of success is random. 

You can also try random things to see if by luck the system would wipe off the affected memory so that the program reads 0 from it. The random things you can try could be opening/closing a browser tab, running/closing a program, locking/unlocking screen, etc.

If nothing works, by increasing the memory of the VM, we have a better chance to have the counter read as 0 so that the VM can start.

Anyway, after fail to start the VM for several times, you may try this simple trick too. It takes about 1 minute of your time and may surprisingly work (you may still need to try starting the VM a couple of times after the change, because it only increases the chance of success but whether it will succeed is still random.)

  1. Go to the Settings of the guest VM.
  2. Select System.
  3. Select the Motherboard tab.
  4. Increase Base Memory (in my case, I only increase it by 100MB).
  5. Start the VM.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

this helped me, thanks a lot....

Sxs said...

Doesn't work for me even after uninstalling, reinstalling, changing memory, removing McAfee and doing all the steps again.....!!!!

Sxs said...

Tried uninstalling Virtual Box, uninstalling McAfee, rebooting, installing Virtual Box.....tried increasing base memory as suggested but nothing works!!! Still getting rc=-5640.....

GV said...

Had the same problem and after a week longs search I stumbled upon this trick.
Keep the Virtual box open with the system you want to open.
lock the computer Alt+Ctrl+Del, open the computer and open your virtual machine right away.
I have tried multiple times and this worked for me with out any issue. I tried waiting for a few minutes and then open virtual box then it fails.


 
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