HA disconnecting when Virtualbox closed

I have a unique problem and this has been happening since the last HA update. Normally I run a headless instance of HA in virtualbox. When VB closes, it continues to run in the background without any interruption to HA. However, recently VB needs to be actively open or HA disconnects and will not reconnect until I open the VB app again and leave the window open. This seems like a VB problem but there has been no recent VB updates and the problem seems to have started after the lat HA updates (I’m running the latest updates). Can anyone offer some insight here? Anyone having a similar problem?