UPDATE:
After repeatedly being exposed to this problem, I think I finally understand what the issue is with this slow-start — mostly conjecture on my part.
On my PC, I don’t have any wired Ethernet connection (I have Ethernet ports, but I haven’t connected them). I rely on the Wi-Fi connection for my Internet access. With the VirtualBox software installed, it installs a virtual Ethernet port on Windows side of things to connect with a Virtual LAN Bridge that networks the VirtualBox virtual machine with the Windows machine. This virtual Ethernet port comes up right away (I assume it is set to be always up) while, I think, the Wi-Fi port probably has some small initial start-up time that it takes to initialize itself. At start-up or wake-up, Windows, I think, then sees only one up network port (the port into the Virtual Bridge) and tries initially to use this port to connect to the Internet and continues to try and retry and finally, after some retries/timeouts, falls back to using the Wi-Fi port for the Internet connection which by this time has come up.
Unfortunately, I haven’t figured out a clean solution that will allow me to keep both the VirtualBox installation as-is *and* give my Wi-Fi port some priority (or have some sort of Windows networking start up delay that allows the Wi-Fi port some time to initialize itself before Windows tries to start using it).
If anyone with VirtualBox experience knows of some way of tweaking the virtual-port to start-up after a delay, please chime in in the comments.
Original Blog Entry:
I had installed Oracle’s (previously Sun’s) VirtualBox software on my Windows 7 machine and subsequently I noticed that every time I started into Windows 7 after waking up from sleep or powering on the PC or rebooting the PC, the WiFi connection would not come up for 1-2 minutes. After a lot of experimentation, I found that un-checking the “VirtualBox Bridged Networking Driver” setting in the “Wireless Network Connection Properties” dialog for my wireless card solved the problem. No more slow-start. Not sure if this results in other problems for VirtualBox, but for now this is good for me. Getting to the dialog is via Control Panel > Network and Internet > Network and Sharing Center and click on “Change Adapter Settings” on the left-hand side. This brings up the list of adapters and right-click on your wireless adapter and choose “Properties” for the “Wireless Network Connection Properties” for your wireless adapter.
