[Bug]: wrong placement of crash report file

[the-Arioch]

Version

7.2.8

Host OS Type

Windows

Host OS name + version

Windows 10

Host Architecture

x86

Guest OS Type

Windows

Guest Architecture

x86

Guest OS name + version

winXP x64, but that is not relevant

Component

Unspecified

What happened?

While digging into #638 i noticed two peculiar files in my user home directory.

• C:\Users\XXXXX\2026-04-22-12-51-33.046-VirtualBoxVM.exe-16700.log
• C:\Users\XXXXX\2026-04-22-10-49-44.015-VirtualBoxVM.exe-18396.log

Nothing very interesting inside, but they were silently stored in the user home folder immediately, which is somewhat unexpected and certainly not what was specified in "global files" at https://docs.oracle.com/en/virtualization/virtualbox/6.0/admin/vboxconfigdata.html

It would be nice if they would be moved either into %TEMP% folder (where mantainance procedures are expected to find and remove residual garbage) or into .VirtualBox or into {Virtual Machine Name}\Logs as specified in the manual, if they are worth being persisted.

vbox_crash_user_home_wrong_folder.zip

Hope the specific content in the logs would help you finding the neglectful place in the sources that creates temporary files into unexpected undocumented places

How can we reproduce this?

Run any VM after having installer broken drivers installation

Did you upload all of your necessary log files, screenshots, etc.?

• Yes, I've uploaded all pertinent files to this issue.

[Qapla-git]

This bug affects multiple people on multiple operating systems, myself included. See the discussion at https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=114520

A suggested workaround is to use an export or env command to add VBOX_LOG_DEST=... to the start of a VM or the start of VirtualBox itself.

This "feature" to activate/deactivate/define the default logging location should be exposed in a preferences option. Until then this IS a bug because VirtualBox is dropping files in the userspace outside of its documented work environment.

[AlexanderEichner]

It definitely is a bug, VirtualBox is not supposed to create those log files.