Windows – Cannot start VirtualBox on Windows 10 – (Failed to acquire the VirtualBox COM object)

vagrantvirtual machinevirtualboxwindows 10

Greetings to the community, I recently tried to open my VirtualBox (windows 10 host OS) after approximately 3-4 months (when everything was perfect). Unfortunately, now the VirtualBox is unable to get started and I'm getting the following error message

Failed to acquire the VirtualBox COM object.
The application will now terminate.

Completely failed to instantiate CLSID_VirtualBox: ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND 0x80070002.


Result Code: 
ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND 0x80070002 (0x80070002)
Component: 
VirtualBoxClientWrap
Interface: 
IVirtualBoxClient {d2937a8e-cb8d-4382-90ba-b7da78a74573}

error message

What I have tried so far is:

  1. Uninstall the virtualbox installation

  2. Re-install

  3. Reboot

(failed)

I have searched on the web for a solution but did not find anything really enlightening. Maybe this was caused due to a corrupted file on my system? Could you please provide an alternative workaround? I just do not want to lose my existing VMs.
Thanks in advance 🙂

PS: I don't know if this is related, but I have previously used Vagrant on my system, I mention that because it would not come to me as a surprise if the Vagrant corrupted something related to the VirtualBox.

Best Answer

Solved it by deleting C:\Users\[Username]\.VirtualBox.

Note: I have previously installed VB and the issue only came up after I installed a new one.

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