• I frequently get a BSOD. It happens almost 100% of the time when I try to restart the VM, and often while using the VM. The last one complained about ES1371MP.SYS.

This suggests that Tools are not functioning properly. Can you try to reinstall them?

That was my assumption, and I tried to reinstall them before I reported my problem.

I just tried again after recovering from the BSOD above. The first time I tried, the installation seemed to hang. It did not display the normal tools installation dialog. I cancelled the tools installation and tried again. This time it worked, but the VM hung after I restarted it. I see the window below, and there is no change and no disk activity. If I click inside the window and move the mouse pointer over where the task bar should be, I get the Windows hour glass.

cid:911E72EF-B6DB-4897-9077-8E373AF3A6C0@home

For historical reasons, we present single-core CPUs to the guest (so a guest would see four single-core CPUs, not two dual-core or one quad-core). The problem is that non-server versions of Windows (including Vista) limits you to two "physical" CPUs.

That is unfortunate, but not anything I'll lose any sleep over.

Thanks.

I have been in contact with VMware support, and I have followed all suggestions. I started with 2.0.0-116369. I later installed 2.0.1-116369, 2.0.1-125077, and finally 2.0.1-128865. Yesterday I upgraded to 1.3.3-94249, which worked fine previously. My cursor problems went away and performance was back to what it was before I installed 2.0, but I seem to have traded one set of problems for another. Perhaps I didn't successfully remove all 2.0 traces from my Mac or my VM. That is the "executive summary". Read on.

I saw no improvement after installing 2.0.1-116369. After installing 2.0.1-125077, the only change I saw was that Office 2007 under Vista wanted to be reactivated. When I tried to reactivate it, I got an error message from Microsoft saying that Office 2007 had been activated too many times. I called Microsoft, and they told me that my activation code was illegal. The BSOD provlem under XP was as bad as ever, but my cursor sometimes worked properly in Vista.

I installed 2.0.1-128865, and Office stopped complaining, but my cursor consistently didn't work; the VM wouldn't let go of it, and movement inside the VM window was slow. As many of my tools thatI need for my work (specifically Adobe CS3) are still Windows-based, and I was in the middle of a big project this month, this was a major headache for me.

It might have been my imagination, but I seemed to see fewer BSODs from my XP VM, but I had given up on restarting it by this time If I needed to restart, I would shut down the VM, shut down VMware, and then restart.

It was also about this time that I noticed another curious change. I have two drives in my Mac with hardware designations of disk0 and disk1. Disk0 contains Mackentosh HD and my Boot Camp partition running Vista. Disk1 is only used by Time Machine, and I sometimes use it for temporary storage. At least, this was the situation before installing 128865. After I finished the instalation, disk0 had become disk1 and disk1 had become disk0 (see attached screen shots). The Boot Camp VM metadata was in a folder called ".../Virtual Machines/Boot Camp/%2Fdev%2Fdisk1".

After I shut down and restarted the Mac, the disk names were back the way they should have been. When I started VMware, it created a new folder called ".../Virtual Machines/Boot Camp/%2Fdev%2Fdisk0". In the VMware window, it showed two Boot Camp VM's, but of course the one for disk1 didn't work. The disk0 VM would start.

It was about this time that the VMware support person said (more or less), "OK, you claim it worked under 1.3.3? Reinstall 1.3.3." Since I had problems with 2.0, I reckon I shouldn't use it This is like the old comedy routine, "Patient: Doctor, it hurts when I do this!" "Doctor: Don't do that!"

I upgraded to 13.3 after following the support person's procedure for removing 2.0.1. My Vista Boot Camp VM was back to normal. The cursor worked as it was supposed to, and performance was fine. It was about this time that I hit another problem. I was away from my Mac for a while, and the Vistta VM went to sleep. I got the pop-up message from VMware saying something like, "Your virtual machine has gone to sleep. Click to restart." I can't remember the exact message. I'd seen this before and it had never been a problem. I'd click in the VM window, I'd have to enter my Vista password again, and I'd be right back where I was.

This time was different. Not only did the Vista VM not wake up, but VMware gave an "unrecoverable error" message (see attached log file), and my Mac went to sleep. Well, it didn't exactly go to sleep, but response time could be measured in geological epochs. After more than a half hour of trying, I finally managed to force-quit VMware, and the Mac returned to normal.

Overall, it wasn't a productive day.

OK, I now have my cursor back, but the price seems rather steep. Previously under 2.0, my VMware problems only affected my VMs. Now, they affect the Mac side as wel.

You think Mac OS X changed the boot order? Then how do you explain the fact that immediately before I installed VMware, Mackentosh HD was on disk0, immediately after installing VMware (+and without a reboot+), Mackentosh HD was on disk1? I have the screen shots to prove it. When I rebooted the system, things were back to normal except that VMware had created a "disk1..." Boot Camp VM before the reboot that didn't work afterwards. Yes, I think you should handle it better...

I've upgraded from 2.0.1 to 1.3.3, and I'm almost back to where I was before I installed 2.0.0. I now have problems with my Vista Boot Camp VM that I did not previously have, but at least when it works, all of it works.

Most of my problems were resolved by subsequent releases of VMware. However, the problem with the sticking cursor remained. Whenever I clicked inside a VM window (XP or Vista), the mouse stayed in the window until I pressed command-ctrl. This was a great source of irritation. I had other problems with the latest VMware update, so I switched to Parallels, and no, I am NOT suggesting that anyone else do the same!

Much to my surprise, the mouse problem existed in Parallels as well! The mouse did work properly in "Coherence" mode, but in "Window" mode the VM grabbed the mouse until I pressed the key combination to release it. I visited the Parallels web site and found an article about this very problem. The solution was to disable "pointer trails" under the mouse settings in Control Panel. This solved the problem instantly. Perhaps it will solve the problem forVMware users as well.