30 second freeze at guest startup

[TowJam]

Configuration:

• 13" MBP - 4gb, 250gb drive

• OS X 10.5.7

• Fusion 2.05

• Vista SP1 x86 (installed under Boot Camp)

• Shared (NAT) networking (using 802.11n wireless)

• Default Fusion settings

• VMWare tools installed

When putting up Vista under Fusion, the Vista guest seems starts normally but during the boot process there's about a 30 second period where I lose all mouse/keyboard input for the guest and host. I think it's happening as the guest initializes the networking connection but I can't be certain. It may also be while the guest is detecting the standard Mac USB devices. This is 100% reproducible and has been going on since I first started using my trial version ~25 days ago.

Is is just me or has anyone else encountered this? Are there any workarounds or ways to minimize this delay? Other than this one particular glitch, I've been happy with Fusion and will be purchasing a license as soon as my trial version expires.

thanks in advance.

[admin]

During the boot sequence the mouse and keyboard will not appear to work as you do not see a cursor. If the Guest OS is in focus, on your keyboard press Control + Command. This will give the pointer back to the Host OS.

Let me know if this helps.

Eric

[TowJam]

Thanks Eric - I'll give that a try when I get home to my Mac this evening. (I'm still new to the Mac and Fusion so my apologies if this seems like a total noob question.)

[admin]

Don't be sorry for being new. Everyone is new at some point. If you're looking for some information to get to know Fusion a little better check out A Beginner's Guide to VMware Fusion

Eric

[admin]

In addition to what said, another possibility is from the release notes:

Slow boot of Boot Camp virtual machines caused by a bug in Apple's Boot Camp software

A slow boot of a Boot Camp virtual machine can be caused by Apple kbdmgr.exe. This is a bug in Apple's Boot Camp software.

Workaround: Click Start > Run, then enter msconfig. Click on Startup, and disable kbdmgr.exe. (If you need Apple's keyboard extensions when rebooting into Boot Camp, then re-enable kbdmgr.exe before rebooting.)

This isn't explicitly mentioned in the release notes, but we found that the delay in booting due to this issue is about 30 seconds, which is why I bring this up.