virtualbox can't create/register machines

[robvr]

I'm trying to get Virtualbox working on, admittedly, a fairly old host machine (32 bit athlon). This isn't working so far, but the failure mode suggests the age of the machine has nothing to do with the problem..

I can create and run a virtual machine from the GUI management tool. However, once I close that tool, the machine is gone. All the files are still there, but it just doesn't show up anymore. So, I cleaned out all the relevant files, and tried from the command line. Same result..

[audiodef]

Are you married to virtualbox? I started out trying to get it working and had various issues, and finally got a remote vm up and running with qemu/kvm.
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[bbgermany]

[robvr]

I'm not married to Virtualbox per se, but it might eventually boil down to that.

Let me explain what the machine is supposed to be doing.

I have an old, but fairly unique Oki MD5000 printer (ALPS 5000 rebox), which connects using a parallel port. Driver support is limited to Win98 or "quite good but not official" Win2K. This is what I'm married to, and though hardly comfortably, it's not a marriage I can get out of.

All other considerations are of (in)convenience. I can run a dual boot system, of course, but with OSes this old, I mustn't even consider touching anything that smells of networking unless the network touched is locked down extremely well. Very inconvenient. Up until about a year ago, I could get by with a Linux system running an old (2.6) kernel, Vmware, and a Win98 install inside the VM, but some recent high-profile security issues made that too dangerous to continue. On a modern (software wise) 32 bit machine, VMware won't run. This killed my hybrid solution of doing part of my work inside a Win98 VM, and the rest through remote X on an application server.

Using Win2K, Virtualbox should have been capable of restoring my old situation, but this too appears to be impossible due to the rather silly issue I started this post about.

I've been using the open source version of Virtualbox (the one I get when merging app-emulation/virtualbox). I suppose I could take app-emulation/virtualbox-bin for a spin; it shouldn't make a difference, but given the ridiculous nature of the problem, it just might (especially since this would imply a downgrade to 4.3 from 5.1)

So, given that Virtualbox is merely a means to an end, I'm open to suggestions for alternatives.

[robvr]