The solution was to reinstall the vbox dkms package and do a manual modprobe of the modules it makes. I never sorted out the unable to start due to the USB issue, I did have the guest additions installed but the only way to boot was to change the pointing device from USB to PS2 and then to disable the USB controller (if your pointing device is set as USB, disabling USB will not work because it will re-enable by default when it sees your pointing device is USB, this is w........

The solution is to run '/etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup' and sometimes happens when upgrading VBox and the kernel modules don't get upgraded with it. Sometimes the above doesn't work until you reboot because sometimes other unknown processes (even the file manager possibly) may be locking the old module from being unloaded. Failed to open a session for the virtual machine XP. The virtual machine 'XP' has terminated unexpectedly during startup with exit code 1.........