Solution to “VirtualBox can't operate in VMX root mode” error in Windows 7

I was trying out various virtualization solutions on Windows 7, including Microsoft Virtual PC and VirtualBox. I booted a VM in Virtual PC and felt that it wasn't good enough, so later I installed VirtualBox. But when I was about to launch the VM, I saw this error message:

VirtualBox can't operate in VMX root mode.

VBox status code: -4011 (VERR_VMX_IN_VMX_ROOT_MODE).
The reason is that there was still a Virtual PC host instance in my memory, which occupied the CPU's VT-X resources. The trivial solution is to have the Windows host a restart, but since I didn't wanna close my other applications, I did some Google-ing for solutions and only found ones for Linux hosts. Nobody has a solution for Windows 7 with Virtual PC.

After that I searched for some Virtual PC-related keywords in Services and Task Manager, and found that the resource owner is the process named vpc.exe . Killing this process solves this problem, and no restart is needed.

By the way, VirtualBox runs Windows XP twice as fast than Virtual PC does.

REF：https://blog.yorkxin.org/posts/2010/12/26/vbox-vmx-win7/