Fusion 8.5.4 killed Unity mode

[mdawson69]

I (unwisely) upgraded to Fusion 8.5.4 Friday morning and beginning Friday afternoon, my Windows 8.1 VM started flaking out. First the VM was non-responsive when I clicked the Excel 2013 icon on the Dock. I also could not get Excel 2013 to launch from the menubar, so I restarted the VM. Once the VM restarted it did not go back into Unity mode as it normally does and the icon for entering Unity mode on the window is disabled. Unity mode is also disabled in the Fusion View menu. So now my Win8.1 VM is useless to me because working in windowed or full screen modes is counterproductive to my workflow.

Ironically, my Windows 7 VM is not having this issue.

[JessieZhang · Accepted solution]

Hi mdawson69,

Is tools installed correctly in your Windows 8.1 VM? Could you please try uninstalling then re-installing tools and see if the issue gets resolved after that?

[mdawson69]

Thanks Jessie,

I found this thread about issues with Unity Mode disappearing and attempted to follow it. The first step is to remove VMware Tools, but when I went into Programs and Features, VMware Tools was not listed. So this means that at some point between running the Fusion update early on Friday morning and early Friday afternoon, VMware Tools just magically uninstalled itself from my Windows 8.1 VM; I had been using the VM all morning without issue. When I attempt to re-install VMware Tools, the installer gets as far as “Starting services” and then stalls. Eventually I get a pop-up dialog that states:

Service 'VMware CAF Management Agent Service' (VMwareCAFManagementAgentHost) failed to start. Verify that you have sufficient privileges to start system services.

I am the admin for this VM so I should have privileges to do anything.

[mdawson69]

So the solution was to go back to a snapshot of my VM from before the Fusion update and then run the installer as an administrator. It seems to work fine now. Part of this is a Windows issue, as the system administrator running on their administrative account should not have to go out of their way to “Run as administrator”. I am still at a loss as to why this VM went out of whack while my other VM has no issues.