Erratic / slow mouse movement after Version 5 upgrade

[HanSooloo]

Working in Unity mode on an MBA with Core i7 and 4GB RAM on Lion 10.7.4.  Happens with pretty much any app.  Hard to say what triggers the condition, maybe modal dialog boxes, e.g., Save, etc.

Mouse starts moving really slowly, as if it got trapped in sand.  Lags behind actual physical mouse movement.  I see that the host CPU usage goes to almost 33% with nothing else running when the mouse issue starts.

Tried disabling mouse detection for gaming mode to no avail.

Anyone else experienced this?  Any potential fixes?

[tkarpinski]

turned off 3d acceleration, that seems to have helped significantly.  Here's my setup

[FranHoey]

Turning off 3d Acceleration has worked for me too!

[Hank4162]

Turning off 3D accelleration dramatically improved mouse behaviour for me to where Version 5 is now usable for me. Still, I note that mouse movement still isn't as smooth as in Version 4. If I move my mouse pointer from one side of the screen to the other, it's movement is still a bit jerky. But at least now, it isn't stalling for one or two seconds at a time like it did before I turned off 3D accelleration.

[HanSooloo]

Don't know how/how the post was marked "Answered", but the issut is still there.  This is after disabling 3D acceleration, disabling gaming mode, etc.

Issue comes up mostly with Outlook 2010, since that is the one program running in the VM all the time.  Other apps exhibit this behavior, especially when there are modal dialog boxes open.

VMware, can you please look into this?  Judging by the number of comments we are seeing here, it is not an isolated problem.

[FranHoey]

Is it possible to mark something as Unanswered?

TBH, I've given up, I don't use Unity anymore. If you start a new thread, let me know and I'll re-post.

Fran

[mymilkexpired]

I'm right there with you, running in full screen mode now.

Its a pity that VMware seems to be neglecting this.

[admin]

Please try shutting down your VM and adding the following line to your .vmx file:

mks.noColorHostCursor = "FALSE"

Reports of success/failure on systems seeing the slow cursor issue appreciated.

[HanSooloo]

This seems to have worked, even with 3D Acceleration enabled.  Will keep monitoring and let everyone know if anything changes.

Curious about the name of the parameter and what it implies .... color host cursor?

[johnwstewart]

This seems to have fixed it for me. After weeks of frustration with mouse performance on Fusion 5, it's been fine all day after this addition to VMX.

[catalogue]

Fixed not just the mouse problem but IE window resize that it wouldn't do before and a repeating key problem where a sinlge key press would adopt a key hold down repeat action. I believe it also corrupted our accounts. All of which seems to be fixed now!

[owells]

I followed these instructions (after a little Google Fu to find out what a .vmx file was ) and SO FAR it seems to have resolved this issue for me. Previously anytime I opened a modal dialog my cursor would IMMEDIATELY slow down to a crawl and was totally unusable for 30-45 seconds. Especially if the VM had been running for a while. I would have to wait for it to catch up and respond to clicks. Kinda hard to use Windows without dialog boxes. But after this that doesn't seem to be happening anymore. Granted it's only been a few minutes and a fresh reboot of the VM might be a factor. So I'm cautiously optimistic. I'll post again if anything changes.

Thanks!

[msuen]

Thanks, it fix the erratic mouse issue!

[johnwstewart]

5.0.2 came out recently and I was hopeful this would have been resolved.

It is not. I had this posted "fix" in and after upgrading to 5.0.2 the slow mouse is back. It's not as bad as 5.0.1 was, but it's definitely there, and still a huge impact on Windows usability.

Edit - I see that

mks.noColorHostCursor = "FALSE"

is in the VMX file after the upgrade to 5.0.2. Should we remove this??

[owells]

In 5.0.1 the addition of ....

mks.noColorHostCursor = "FALSE"

... to the VMX files seemed to help dramatically.  After 5.0.2 was released I noticed that I was still experiencing slow mouse movement in certain MODAL DIALOGS though not as bad as before.  Specifically I was using MS Project 2010 where I noticed this. I removed this entry from the VMX file and it seemed to help a bit. What I'm seeing can be summed up like this ....

5.0.1

- ANY modal dialog causes the mouse to grind to a snail's pace.

- The addition of the above entry to the VMX file fixes this for SINGLE-TAB modal dialogs only

5.0.2

- SINGLE-TAB modal dialogs seem to work fine with or without the above entry in the VMX file

- MULTI-TAB modal dialogs (e.g. the Summary Task Information dialog in MS Project) start out with OK responsiveness but get progressively slower over time. Removing the above entry from the VMX file seemed to improve mouse responsiveness.

[brookssw]

To those still struggling with this problem, I've found only one solution that worked for me personally; I downgraded to VMware Fusion 4. Between this issue, and problems with unity recovering from sleep mode, I have come to believe that the upgrade was a complete waste of my money. In contract, VMware fusion 4 works perfectly, and 5 offers nothing I need that 4 lacks.

So my advice to you is get a refund, or don't upgrade at all if it's not too late. Save your money and buy something useful/good with it.

[brookssw]

Additional information that might assist folks at VMWare who are trying to fix this problem (Assuming someone is actually trying over there):

The issue of slow mouse movement occurs when there are multiple windows, or especially dialogs, overlapping. The slow movement ONLY occurs where the windows overlap, so you could be two dialogs deep and be just fine, as long as those dialogs are occupying their own desktop space. If a dialog is partially overlapping another, the mouse will move perfectly up until you cross the border of the window underneath the dialog you are in. At this point, the mouse movement slows.

[OllieR]

Simon B wrote:

Please try shutting down your VM and adding the following line to your .vmx file:

mks.noColorHostCursor = "FALSE"

Reports of success/failure on systems seeing the slow cursor issue appreciated.

This seems to be helping at least a bit on a Win7/x64 guest. My host consists of 4 monitors (2 with 1680*1050 / vertical + 2 with 2560*1440 / horizontal).

Before applying the change, every guest-window (i.e. a Windows Explorer) was painfully slow. Now I can move windows such as WinExplorer around freely without problems.

However, if I run Office + a VBA-IDE window (such as Access or Excel), there's a new issue: the VBA-window is still as slow as all other windows used to be. In addition, I can no longer maximize the VBA-IDE by double-clicking the title bar or by clicking the maximize-button - the window will only cover around 2/3 of the respective monitor. I can, however size it to cover the monitor completely. As for child-windows within the IDE, the perf-issue exists there just as bad.

Also, as soon as I open the IDE, other windows (such as Windows Explorer) will again be just as slow.

[diomark]

I've been sufferring from the slow mouse / laggy mouse movement ever since getting my new LInux laptop (Lenovo W520 w/ Nvidia Quadro 1000M graphis card) . I'm using vmware workstation 9.0, running under Redhat Enterprise 6.3, with a Windows 7 image under it..

In Unity mode, the mouse was laggy to the point of not being usable.. and I've tried everything.. It would work fine 10% of the time, lag 50% of the time, and just plain disappear the other 40% of the time..

The mks.noColorHostCursor = "FALSE" trick didn't do anything that I could see..

Disabling 3d acceleration didn't make a difference

gaming mode on/off didn't make a difference...

But opening the Control panel in the windows guest, starting the "Mouse Properties", and unchecking "Enhance pointer precision” seemed to have finally solved this issue for me..

[brookssw]

After rolling back to 4 some months ago and no longer experiencing the problems, I decided to try upgrading to 5 again. It was kind of like getting too drunk and ending up with a hangover... you know how you get a hangover and swear you'll never drink again, but then inevitably you forget how bad the hangover was, and you get just as drunk, and just as hungover again.... well that's how this was. In the 3-4 months since I first commented on these problems, there have been zero upgrades or patches for fusion, that I can see.

Best I can tell, VMware doesn't seem to care at all for the folks who are having any of the apparently numerous (but admittedly difficult to replicate) problems since upgrading.

One question I have for the community: has anyone noticed this particular problem with a brand new VM that was installed/created in VMware5?

I'm wondering if the issues I'm having are a result of the upgrade itself, and whether they might not occur if the VM is created with version 5.

[admin]

Improvements are on the way soon.