virtualbox-guest-* installed on the host; could this be the cause of system freezing?

Question

I just found out that my mother had several virtualbox packages installed. But not virtualbox itself.

Namely, if I remember correctly, these three:

virtualbox-guest-dkms
virtualbox-guest-utils
virtualbox-guest-x11

And yes, these were installed on the host.

As she never used virtualbox, I probably installed it along with these packages long ago for testing purposes. And forgot to remove these packages along with virtualbox itself.

The question is:

Could this be the cause of system freezing? Well, I am unsure, if the whole system freezes. But the screen freezes almost every day. I am not at the machine, so I don't know if she could just press Ctrl+Alt+Backspace to restart the display manager.

She told me just now, that it happens regularly, almost daily, and she just presses the power button for a few seconds. Oh my god, I say.

So far I found these "suspects" and removed them.

Could you tell me what to look for further and where?

The system is Linux Mint 18.1 Cinnamon 64-bit.

Answer 1

There were multiple issues with this computer:

• installed guest packages on the host system; removed

• bad SSHD disk; replaced

• swappiness was at standard value of 60, but as this computer uses normally 6 GB of RAM and has 8 GB RAM, it was swapping like crazy; set to 1

• kernel was causing some of the issues; upgraded

Situation is now under control.