I re-installed Docker Toolbox on a computer running Windows 7, following the instructions provided on the Docker web site. There are inconsistencies in what happens during the install and what is shown on the web site. For example, what is shown on the web site as the Docker CLI actually appears on my computer as Docker Quickstart Terminal.

Clicking the Docker Quickstart Terminal icon does not execute what is described on the web site. The issue appears to be that the icon is intended to execute a shell script, start.sh that on my computer is associated with Notepad++. After some fiddling I noticed a couple of things, one is that when I right-click the icon, I see options for Git Init Here and Git Bash. If I click Git Bash, a window opens with what appears to be a Bash shell with the folder that the icon is associated to opened as default.

After selecting Git Bash to open the "bash" window, I then ran start.sh and it appears to successfully connect to the default VM created in Virtual Box. I did a little more searching and found the folder C:\Program Files (x86)\Git\bin with a number of programs including sh.exe, which I assume is the bash shell. However, configuring the icon to use sh.exe to open start.sh results in errors. For now I can by with manually running start.sh.

I need to run start.sh in order to associate the bash window with the default virtual machine in which docker is hosted. I assume the script is setting the environment variables described on this page. I have been successful at running the docker "hello-world" container as well as my river4 container.

I have checked, and Kitematic is also using the default vm, so when I start Kitematic I can see the river4 container running. I can't open command lines in Kitematic, and I suspect this is because the environment variables are not being set as needed to access the virtual machine.

Actually, I think the problem is not having the ssh.exe in the PATH on my computer as described in the Using Docker from a Windows Command Line prompt section on this page. I've added c:\Program Files (x86)\Git\bin to the PATH, and I'll need to reboot to confirm that was the issue.

No joy after the reboot, clicking the Quickstart Terminal icon on my desktop generates the same result. I am starting to think I have multiple ssh.exe programs on my computer, and it is finding an incompatible one in my path.