Caps Lock bug in Win 7 VM after sleeping...

[OxkAMam]

The Caps Lock state in a VM is incorrect if you sleep with it enabled, and when disable it on the login prompt when resuming. I've only done limited testing, but it's reproducible. To reproduce:

1) Set a password on your Snow Leopard account (ie. so you will be prompted to enter password when resuming from sleep)

2) Enter Full screen mode in a Win 7 x64 VM running on a MacBook Pro

3) Disable Caps lock and type something into a text editor to confirm you get lowercase characters.

4) Enable Caps lock and type something into a text editor to confirm you get uppercase characters.

5) Close the lid on the MacBook Pro and wait until it goes into sleep mode (ie. light on front starts glowing on/off)

6) Open the lid, enter login password, but before pressing Enter, disable/turn off Caps Lock.

7) Type something into a text editor and you will get uppercase characters, even though Caps Lock is OFF.

😎 Enable Caps lock and type something into a text editor, and you will get lowercase characters, even though Caps Lock is ON.

So, the Caps Lock state is no inverted. To correct the problem, enable Caps Lock, and do steps (5) and (6).

Can someone confirm ?

Is this a bug with Windows or Fusion ?

[admin · Accepted solution]

This is a question that comes up fairly often, and the answer is that it's a limitation of interfacing with Mac OS X. Here's a recent thread on the topic: http://communities.vmware.com/message/1724171#1724171.

And here's a Knowledge Base article on this topic: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1004192.

Stephen Gardner

Desktop Technical Support Specialist

Global Support Services

VMware Inc.

[OxkAMam]

Thanks for the info Stephen.

I have posted an idea on how to possibly solve this issue in the forum thread you mentioned. Essentially....,

If it only happens when resuming from sleep, does Fusion get a notification when resuming from sleep ?

If so, would the following work when a notification is received:

-  On the OSX side, check the state of the Shift keys, simulate a normal  keypress and capture the character output (eg. preferably in memory, but  piping it to a file would do)

- Check whether the character is  uppercase or lowercase, and depending on the state of the Shift key,  Fusion will/should know whether Caps is on or off.

- Use this information to sync the Caps state in VM's

or has this already been tried ?

[admin]

You're welcome.

Thanks for the thoughts! I can't speak for what our development team has considered, but I'll pass the idea on to them.