I tried disabling the "HID-compliant mouse" drivers through the windows
device manager => it leaves me with a mouse pointer that can go beyond
the 640x480 area, but I can't click anymore

At which level do you "disable USB" ?

• at the VM configuration level ? (through editing the vmx file, for

instance)

• somewhere else in the windows / system / device manager ?

( for reference, the other threads you mentioned are:
http://communities.vmware.com/message/1292437
http://communities.vmware.com/thread/229545 )

(Remark: this bug is also discussed there http://communities.vmware.com/message/1355397, but this thread seems the most relevant)

I have had the problem at home since about 1 month and a half, after ugrading the system and it is still there after ugrading from 2.5.0 to 2.5.2 then 2.5.3. I now use KDE 4.3.0, xorg 7.4, kernel 2.6.31rc6 (opensuse 11.2 M6) I do not know the build number of the VMtools, but the windows ISO was a priori extracted from the Workstation 6.5.3 bundle. It occurs with Win2K, XP and Seven rc1 VMs...

At work, I do not have the problem using an old Win2K VM with VMplayer 2.5.3 and VMtools build 80187 inside an opensuse 11.1 (KDE 4.24, xorg 7.4, kernel 2.6.27.29). If I look at the hardware config in the Win2K VM I have 2 USB HID mouse entries + 1 VMware pointing device and I have usb.present = "TRUE" in my vmx file. The mouse does not appear in the list of USB device in the "Devices" menu, so that it should not work if I understood correctly the previous messages

I've been having this exact problem for 2-3 months now and can't find a solution.

So, I was really happy to find this a few days ago:

This is so annoying. sigh

My workaround now is to use a VNC client to connect to the virtual machine, but this can't be more than a workaround.
There has to be real solution, right?

VmWare guys, are you listening???
You have been doing such a wonderful work for the last 10 years (I am one of your first customers!)
Please don't screw it up now!

Please let me know if I can help somehow.

Here is some more information about the bug:

• my OS is Ubuntu 9.04 (with all patches), 64bit on my workstation, 32bit on my laptop.
• my (most used) guest OS is WinXP-SP3 (with all updates)
• I've been trying with VmWare Workstation 6.5.1, 6.5.2, 6.5.3 - no difference
• I restored a snapshot from April 2008 - same problem
• I restored a snapshot from June 2007 - mouse ungrab works, but autograb doesn't (when entering the VmWare window with the mouse)

Hope this helps a bit to track down the bug.

Bye,
Andy.

edited by ciberandy (more technical information)

I researched this issue about a month ago and found this article:

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-783680.html

In summary, apparently the issue is the newer version of GTK+. The somewhat good news is it looks like at least VMware 6.5.3 comes with it's own version of GTK+. There's a wrapper script called wrapper-gtk24.sh with the distribution. According to this script, if you set the environment variable:

export VMWARE_USE_SHIPPED_GTK=yes
or
export VMWARE_USE_SHIPPED_GTK=force

before launching VMware, it seems to work just fine.

-f

I do not have internet at home since Friday due to a thunder strike nearby I suppose.

However, I managed to get the home VM working full screen by editing the VMX file (commmenting out the usb.xxx lines and also setting the vmmouse.present to FALSE (if I remember well)

A question of curiosity, since I am using KDE: Are VMplayer and VMware Workstation using QT or GTK under KDE?

Sorry, that doesn't work for us.

We assume, that something must go wrong with USB/Mouse/Keybord. In that machine/board, where that kind of error appears, there we had trouble with edev in X, because mouse and keyboard appear twice: as a USB-(HID)-Device and as an ordinary ps2-device. Thats because "real" PS2-Device seems emulated via USB even there are these connectors. On starting XP as guest a warning tells, that there is a "ServerEngines SE USB Device". As told above, this double appearance of keyboard and mice triples, if we put in a USB-C Media Audio Device (because the server has no sound) and finds a third keyboard because of the keys for volume/mute (We need this as an alarming system replacing lacking SATA-Drive-lights in an array, it tells for example: "number one - number one" if the first drive has troubles . Therefore always us-keybord is chosen and other automatically defaults of X - X seems to ignore xorg.conf completely.

Of course, we must move vmware to another machine for this one and only a kind of statistic Windows-Program for which we need vmware/XP and which is run approximately twice a week. Hopefully, one of VMware guys reads here into: On qemu this runs without problems and seems to be much less ressource consuming, but we test this in parallel a couple of weeks, so, if there is no solution within this time, we start with qemu...

wbr HHelen

Hum, this is really strange. This does NOT work for me. The mouse will not ungrab even using this setting. I still have to disable the USB controller. Now, I'm not using 640x480, but rather 1920x1200. I don't know if that's an issue or not.