What makes a Windows 10, 11, 2025 Server VM all fail in VirtualBox with numerous weird bug checks (IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL, KERNEL_SECURITY_CHECK_FAILURE, PROCESS1_INITIALIZATION_FAILED)?
Prelude
NB: Skip this section if you don’t care about how I ended up with VirtualBox in the first place! TL;DR at the bottom.
After migrating away from Ubuntu quite some time ago, I took the plunge and tried Manjaro Linux. I’m happy with it still. It feels more stable than what I have seen of Arch, yet more up-to-date than Debian and derivatives. I still run a few machines with Debian, Ubuntu/Kubuntu and Mint, but may main workstation has been on Manjaro for a while now.
Originally I used VMware Workstation for virtualization needs. I had paid and upgraded across several major versions. As readers of this blog will know, I mourned the discontinuation of the Replay Debugging feature. My first VMware version was 2.x for Linux, btw.
Anyway, with Ubuntu this sort of worked. The VMware kernel modules sort of built fine and integrated fine with Ubuntu. However, if you dared upgrading the point releases 1 and updated the kernel to one of the HWE kernels, things would start falling apart.
Obviously Manjaro’s kernel version — at the time I switched — was way ahead of Ubuntu’s. Consequently VMware Workstation was no longer an option. Even Broadcom changing the licensing making VMware Workstation more or less free to use for private and commercial settings makes no difference in this scenario. Because VMware was at the time really bad regarding its kernel modules getting updated 2.
So I ended up migrating to Qemu/KVM first. However, this was merely an interlude, because the user experience was IMO quite shoddy. No matter the UI frontend, none played nicely with a multi-monitor setup. And Remmina as a frontend was also a disappointment … perhaps in this case Wayland was in part to blame.
Either way, I am a private user, so VirtualBox — on account of its licensing — was an option. This is where I ended up. I have to say the user experience is almost on par with that of VMware Workstation for most workflows.
Since I came from Qemu/KVM, the road to VirtualBox had a few bumps. Hardware-assisted hypervisors are like The Highlander: there can be only one. And throughout the kernel versions that I experienced with Manjaro, the behavior of the KVM kernel modules also changed (ticket). However, I never really experienced much friction on account of KVM and VirtualBox kernel modules clashing.
New year starts: … so does the weirdness
Alright, so after new years, I decided to clean up the system a little. I got rid of a few orphaned packages. Initially inspecting what would be the list of orphans with pacman -Qtd then accepting its output with: sudo pacman -Rns $(pacman -Qtdq).
Good riddance, orphaned packages.
Soon after — please note that I don’t use virtualization all the time, since most of my computing needs are satisfied by Linux — the first Windows VM refused to start. First it stopped with IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL bug check, if I remember correctly. A good old “friend” from my time as Windows driver developer, usually pointing to flawed drivers. But I hadn’t even booted the VM in question in between, so a bug check like that would rather suggest hardware issues or cosmic radiation 😜
In between I got to see a KERNEL_SECURITY_CHECK_FAILURE bug check. I managed to boot it up with BlueCon and nothing seemed amiss. But booting into the installed Windows failed once again. Weird.
In the end it settled for PROCESS1_INITIALIZATION_FAILED, yikes. That should mean smss.exe (aka the first process in user mode) could not be started. But why?
Since this was a previously installed VM, the guest additions were installed.
First attempts at diagnosing
While scouring the web for leads I found references to 3D acceleration being the culprit. Alas, the option is grayed out and unchecked with the configured VBoxSVGA adapter for the VM. Probably a result of me choosing “Windows Server 2025 (64-bit)” as the “OS Version” setting.
So we could rule this out.
Then I searched further and came across all sorts of advice ranging from TPM to other alleged culprits but which boiled down to either some odd amount of RAM or assigning multiple CPUs/cores to the VM.
Alright, so in one thread the wisdom was to set the amount of RAM to 4096 MiB exactly and assign a single CPU, if I recall it correctly.
Surprise, this allowed me to boot up the VM one last time, but it crashed before reaching the desktop. I never managed to boot it afterward, even after fixing the root cause on the VirtualBox side.
Experimenting
At this point I decided to simply install a fresh VM. I tried Windows 11 and Server 2025. Sometimes they’d even run through most of the setup, but sometimes they would fail relatively early.
The few times it finished, it would quickly deteriorate after the first boot into the desktop.
None of it made much sense.
I then tried 1 CPU and 4096 MiB of RAM. Bingo: it was the most sluggish setup ever, but it booted. It was seemingly stable, but unbearingly sloooooow. Definitely no alternative to the status quo ante, which was a perfectly fine Windows VM.
Digging deeper
So I ended up digging a bit in the pacman.log and noticed I hadn’t updated or installed stuff related to the kernel or VirtualBox since early December 2025. I had upgraded two unrelated packages roughly at the time, but the removal of the orphaned packages was the smoking gun.
This is how the excerpt from the log file looked (feel free to scroll past):
[2026-01-07T15:18:25+0000] [PACMAN] Running 'pacman -Rns -' [2026-01-07T15:18:30+0000] [ALPM] running '05-etckeeper-pre-install.hook'... [2026-01-07T15:18:31+0000] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] [main f24c109] saving uncommitted changes in /etc prior to pacman run [2026-01-07T15:18:31+0000] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] 7 files changed, 9 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-) [2026-01-07T15:18:31+0000] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] create mode 100644 udev/rules.d/99-kvm-switch.rules [2026-01-07T15:18:31+0000] [ALPM] running 'ghc-unregister.hook'... [2026-01-07T15:18:32+0000] [ALPM] running 'texinfo-remove.hook'... [2026-01-07T15:18:32+0000] [ALPM] transaction started [2026-01-07T15:18:32+0000] [ALPM] removed yasm (1.3.0-9) [2026-01-07T15:18:32+0000] [ALPM] removed yara (4.5.4-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:32+0000] [ALPM] removed vcpkg (2025.12.16-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:32+0000] [ALPM] removed zip (3.0-11) [2026-01-07T15:18:32+0000] [ALPM] removed ttf-opensans (3.003-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:32+0000] [ALPM] removed swtpm (0.10.1-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:32+0000] [ALPM] removed supermin (5.3.5-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed cpio (2.15-3) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed squashfs-tools (4.7.4-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed sleuthkit (4.14.0-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed libewf (20140816-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed simdjson (1:4.2.4-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed seatd (0.9.1-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed sdl2_ttf (2.24.0-2) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed scdoc (1.11.4-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed qtkeychain-qt5 (0.15.0-3) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed qemu-base (10.1.2-3) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed virtiofsd (1.13.3-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed qemu-system-x86 (10.1.2-3) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed vde2 (2.3.3-8) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed wolfssl (5.8.4-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed seabios (1.17.0-2) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed rdma-core (60.0-2) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed qemu-system-x86-firmware (10.1.2-3) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed ndctl (79-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed libtracefs (1.8.2-2) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed libtraceevent (1:1.8.6-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed iniparser (4.2.6-2) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed libxdp (1.5.8-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed libslirp (4.9.1-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed dtc (1.7.2-4) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-validate-pyproject (0.24.1-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-trove-classifiers (2025.12.1.14-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-tomli (2.2.1-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-spsdk (2.1.1-2) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-sly (0.5-3) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-ruamel-yaml (0.18.10-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-ruamel.yaml.clib (0.2.15-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-pyocd (0.36.0-2) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-natsort (8.4.0-3) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-intervaltree (3.2.0-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-sortedcontainers (2.4.0-7) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-importlib_resources (6.5.2-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-cmsis-pack-manager (0.5.3-3) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-capstone (5.0.6-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-pylink-square (1.3.0-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-psutil (7.1.3-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-prettytable (3.17.0-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-wcwidth (0.2.14-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-oscrypto (1.3.0-7) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-libusbsio (2.1.11-4) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed libusbsio (2.1.11-4) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-hexdump (3.3-10) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-fastjsonschema (2.21.2-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-deepmerge (1.1.1-2) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-click-option-group (0.5.6-2) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-click-command-tree (1.2.0-3) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-bincopy (20.0.0-2) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-pyelftools (0.32-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-humanfriendly (10.0-9) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-argparse-addons (0.12.0-3) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-astunparse (1.6.3-9) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-asn1crypto (1.5.1-5) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-resolvelib (1.2.1-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-pycryptodome (3.23.0-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-pulsectl (24.4.0-2) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-paramiko (4.0.0-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-pynacl (1.6.1-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-invoke (2.2.1-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-lexicon (3.0.0-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-fluidity (0.2.1-6) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-bcrypt (5.0.0-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-ordered-set (4.1.0-7) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-jinja (1:3.1.6-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-markupsafe (3.0.2-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-installer (0.7.0-10) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-gbinder (1.3.0-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed libgbinder (1.1.43-2) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed libglibutil (1.0.80-2) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-future (1.0.0-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-frozendict (1:2.4.6-2) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-ewmh (0.1.6-6) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-xlib (0.33-4) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-coverage (7.13.0-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:33+0000] [ALPM] removed python-commentjson (0.9.0-8) [2026-01-07T15:18:34+0000] [ALPM] removed python-lark-parser (1.3.1-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:34+0000] [ALPM] removed python-build (1.3.0-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:34+0000] [ALPM] removed python-pyproject-hooks (1.2.0-3) [2026-01-07T15:18:34+0000] [ALPM] removed pyside2 (5.15.13-2) [2026-01-07T15:18:34+0000] [ALPM] removed python-shiboken2 (5.15.13-2) [2026-01-07T15:18:34+0000] [ALPM] removed perl-libintl-perl (1.35-2) [2026-01-07T15:18:34+0000] [ALPM] removed perl-file-slurp-tiny (0.004-13) [2026-01-07T15:18:34+0000] [ALPM] removed pahole (1:1.31-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:34+0000] [ALPM] removed nvm (0.40.3-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:34+0000] [ALPM] removed nasm (3.01-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:34+0000] [ALPM] removed meson (1.10.0-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:34+0000] [ALPM] removed ninja (1.13.2-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:34+0000] [ALPM] removed mbedtls2 (2.28.10-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:34+0000] [ALPM] removed lxc (1:6.0.5-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:34+0000] [ALPM] removed lsscsi (0.32-2) [2026-01-07T15:18:34+0000] [ALPM] removed libosinfo (1.12.0-2) [2026-01-07T15:18:34+0000] [ALPM] removed osinfo-db (20251212-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:34+0000] [ALPM] removed libngtcp2 (1.19.0-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:34+0000] [ALPM] removed libnbd (1.24.0-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:34+0000] [ALPM] removed libldm (0.2.5-3) [2026-01-07T15:18:34+0000] [ALPM] removed libksane5 (24.08.3-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:34+0000] [ALPM] removed ksanecore5 (24.08.3-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:34+0000] [ALPM] removed libindicator (12.10.1-11) [2026-01-07T15:18:34+0000] [ALPM] removed libgovirt (2:0.3.9-2) [2026-01-07T15:18:34+0000] [ALPM] removed librest (0.10.2-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:34+0000] [ALPM] removed libconfig (1.8.2-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:34+0000] [ALPM] removed kcalendarcore5 (5.116.0-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:34+0000] [ALPM] removed http-parser (2.9.4-2) [2026-01-07T15:18:34+0000] [ALPM] removed hivex (1.3.24-5) [2026-01-07T15:18:34+0000] [ALPM] removed haskell-type-equality (1.0.1-3) [2026-01-07T15:18:34+0000] [ALPM] removed haskell-string-conversions (0.4.0.1-271) [2026-01-07T15:18:34+0000] [ALPM] removed haskell-socks (0.6.1-338) [2026-01-07T15:18:34+0000] [ALPM] removed haskell-sha (1.6.4.4-22) [2026-01-07T15:18:34+0000] [ALPM] removed haskell-ghc-bignum-orphans (0.1.1-4) [2026-01-07T15:18:34+0000] [ALPM] removed haskell-digits (0.3.2-10) [2026-01-07T15:18:34+0000] [ALPM] removed haskell-data-array-byte (0.1.0.1-84) [2026-01-07T15:18:34+0000] [ALPM] removed haskell-base64 (1.0-28) [2026-01-07T15:18:34+0000] [ALPM] removed haskell-attoparsec-iso8601 (1.1.1.0-20) [2026-01-07T15:18:34+0000] [ALPM] removed haskell-ansi-wl-pprint (1.0.2-234) [2026-01-07T15:18:34+0000] [ALPM] removed haskell-prettyprinter-compat-ansi-wl-pprint (1.0.2-236) [2026-01-07T15:18:36+0000] [ALPM] removed go (2:1.25.5-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:36+0000] [ALPM] removed glibmm-2.68 (2.86.0-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:36+0000] [ALPM] removed libsigc++-3.0 (3.8.0-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:36+0000] [ALPM] removed gendesk (1.0.10-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:36+0000] [ALPM] removed fakechroot (2.20.1-4) [2026-01-07T15:18:36+0000] [ALPM] removed electron13-bin (13.6.9-2) [2026-01-07T15:18:36+0000] [ALPM] removed dkms (3.3.0-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:36+0000] [ALPM] removed debootstrap (1.0.142-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:36+0000] [ALPM] removed distro-info (1.11-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:36+0000] [ALPM] removed distro-info-data (0.63-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:36+0000] [ALPM] removed cython (3.2.3-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:36+0000] [ALPM] removed box2d (3.1.1-1) [2026-01-07T15:18:36+0000] [ALPM] removed botan2 (2.19.5-2) [2026-01-07T15:18:36+0000] [ALPM] removed autogen (5.18.16-6) [2026-01-07T15:18:36+0000] [ALPM] removed augeas (1.14.1-4) [2026-01-07T15:18:36+0000] [ALPM] removed appstream-glib (0.8.3-3) [2026-01-07T15:18:37+0000] [ALPM] transaction completed [2026-01-07T15:18:37+0000] [ALPM] running '30-systemd-daemon-reload-system.hook'... [2026-01-07T15:18:38+0000] [ALPM] running '30-systemd-udev-reload.hook'... [2026-01-07T15:18:39+0000] [ALPM] running '30-systemd-update.hook'... [2026-01-07T15:18:40+0000] [ALPM] running '90-packagekit-refresh.hook'... [2026-01-07T15:18:40+0000] [ALPM] running 'fontconfig.hook'... [2026-01-07T15:18:40+0000] [ALPM] running 'fontconfig-32.hook'... [2026-01-07T15:18:40+0000] [ALPM] running 'xorg-mkfontscale.hook'... [2026-01-07T15:18:41+0000] [ALPM] running 'zz-etckeeper-post-install.hook'... [2026-01-07T15:18:42+0000] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] [main 1fe9a57] committing changes in /etc made by "pacman -Rns -" [2026-01-07T15:18:42+0000] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] 62 files changed, 1015 deletions(-)
Yay! Well, that’s a mouthful.
Those spurious Git commits? etckeeper! I can warmly recommend this to anyone, even on configuration-managed systems. Only exception perhaps: actually immutable systems. We’ll get back to etckeeper in a bit.
And the list could be condensed considerably by ignoring the python-* and haskell- packages and looking which of the remaining packages were (non-optional) dependencies of one of the others. A few packages stood out. I came up with the following list of potential culprits.
The potential culprits
Here’s the list: qemu-base dkms libosinfo lxc swtpm
For context, I’ve been running my setup with linux617, linux-virtualbox-host-modules-meta and linux617-virtualbox-host-modules. The latter offers precompiled kernel modules for the respective VirtualBox versions.
Qemu (qemu-base) would somehow suggest a clash between KVM and VirtualBox. The others make less sense …
So the first hunch was to update-grub after adding the following to my kernel command line: kvm.enable_virt_at_load=0 module_blacklist=kvm,kvm_intel.
A reboot later, I knew it wasn’t the reason. So this change got rolled back quickly.
I then reinstalled all of the potential culprits, skipping optional dependencies: sudo pamac install qemu-base dkms libosinfo lxc swtpm
After update-grub and mkinitcpio -P and a reboot it all worked again. A VM that hadn’t booted but also hadn’t become fubar, suddenly worked again.
What a mystery 😯 … and a bit of 🎉🥳
I then went through the changes etckeeper had recorded for /etc prior to the removal of the orphans, diffing against the state after reinstalling my potential culprit packages and their dependencies.
The diff was comparably small and it was easy to weed out the unrelated changes (I had for example added no-read-workqueue,no-write-workqueue after discard in /etc/crypttab; which I also rolled back just to be sure).
A cursory check also showed that the KVM and VirtualBox kernel modules could apparently coexist as long as only one of them claimed VT-x:
# lsmod | grep -P '(kvm|vbox)' kvm_intel 438272 0 vboxnetflt 45056 0 vboxnetadp 32768 0 vboxdrv 667648 2 vboxnetadp,vboxnetflt kvm 1400832 2 vboxdrv,kvm_intel irqbypass 16384 1 kvm
On the path back to sanity
I still had no clue what the exact root cause was, but I had gotten closer and I now had working Windows VMs again.
After my little crisis and doubting the deterministic nature of my Linux setup, that was a good feeling. All of this played out over a few days, btw.
First from the list of potential culprits to rule out was libosinfo. After removing it and orphaned packages due to its removal, a quick update-grub, mkinitcpio -P and a reboot later the Windows VMs were still fine and exonerated libosinfo.
After this I did the same one-by-one for lxc and swtpm. They, too, were exonerated.
Since this is 2026 I tried an LLM 3 asking how qemu-base or dkms could possibly affect this. Neither is a dependency for VirtualBox and the kernel modules needed for VirtualBox are meant to come prebuilt. So DKMS certainly shouldn’t be needed.
While the LLM was no help in any step up to this point, it was adamant that out of these two dkms must be the culprit. I argued that this shouldn’t be the case, but its answers remained consistent and steadfast 4.
So I removed qemu-base as the last potential culprit aside from dkms and did the update-grub, mkinitcpio -P and reboot routine.
Turns out, it’s true. Although it isn’t an explicit dependency, the absence of dkms caused the Windows VMs to crash early on. I still have no explanation, because /etc/dkms/framework.conf and /etc/dkms/framework.conf.d aree empty.
So the end of the story is that dkms is now and explicitly installed package and thus won’t be deemed an orphan next time. This also reminded me how useful etckeeper is for rolling back or diagnosing config changes caused by package changes. Most of the time it churns in the background and you won’t see it. But when you need it, it’s there to save the day(s).
Perhaps it helps others (or myself) in the future. Cheers.
// Oliver
TL;DR: dkms, albeit not being a dependency of VirtualBox, was needed for VMs not to crash after they started crashing due to the removal of orphaned packages.
PS: when using etckeeper, use Git. While I am a known and staunch hater of Git and proponent of Mercurial, the Git integration of etckeeper is evidently a lot more robust and tested.
PPS: it wasn’t limited to Windows VMs, my Linux VMs also misbehaved, but they didn’t misbehave as spectacularly and obviously and so were no good for diagnosing if the issue was present or absent.
PPPS: While less people will see and read this here, I was unable to post it on the Manjaro forum, because my account there has apparently been banned for no reason whatsoever … oh well. No contact form, it requires activation but I have no code … could have signed up with a different email address and handle, but couldn’t be bothered.