﻿id	summary	reporter	owner	description	type	status	component	version	resolution	keywords	cc	guest	host
8780	VirtualBox does not start (error 0x80040154) if any environment variable has a value not valid in the current encoding = Fixed in SVN	Vesuri		"I'm running VirtualBox 4.0.6 on Fedora 14, but I suspect this happens in other environments as well. The problem also occurred with VirtualBox 4.0.4.

If I have the following line in my .bash_profile:

export SOME_VARIABLE=<B7>

in which <B7> is the byte 0xB7 (the ISO-8859-1 character ·, which in Unicode is U+00B7 MIDDLE DOT) and the value of the LANG environment variable is en_US.UTF-8, VirtualBox fails to start. It says ""Failed to create the VirtualBox COM object. The application will now terminate. Callee RC: NS_ERROR_FACTORY_NOT_REGISTERED (0x80040154)"".

If I say

unset SOME_VARIABLE

or remove the byte 0xB7 from the value then VirtualBox starts.

The name of the environment variable does not matter and the position in which the 0xB7 byte appears in the environment variable value does not matter either.

I haven't analysed this any further, but I suspect this has something to do with not being able to parse the environment variable value to UTF-8. However, I don't know why VirtualBox cares about the values of all environment variables."	defect	closed	other	VirtualBox 4.0.6	fixed			other	Linux
