Is 6.0.3 or 6.1 coming soon? Two annoying bugs

[avanpelt]

I'm beginning to wonder if VMware Fusion has been pushed to the back burner.

Since upgrading from Fusion Professional 5 to Fusion Professional 6 when I upgraded to Mavericks several months ago, I've had two glaring issues with both my Windows 7 x64 and Windows XP x86 VMs.

Whenever I launch VMware Fusion and select a VM to open in full screen, the menu bar appears at the top of the VM window but it is all gray.  There is no text.  The menu bar persists at the top of the VM window after the VM is powered on and only goes away if I shrink the VM window down from full screen and then make it full screen once again.  While the gray menu bar is visible, I can left click on it and get the traditional menus to appear.  I also encounter this same problem if a VM is already running and I wake my MacBook Pro up from sleep.  I always run my VMs on an external monitor, if that makes any difference.

The other issue is that I Fusion 6.0.2 doesn't seem to remember USB settings.  In Fusion 5, I was able to go into the preferences for each VM and see each of my USB devices and tell it to either "Connect to Windows", "Connect to Mac" or "Ask What to Do".  I have a USB dongle that a software I use requires.  Every time I boot up the VM that contains this software (XP x86), I have to go to the Virtual Machine menu, down to USB, and click "Connect Aladdin USB Key".  It connects right away but as soon as I shut down XP and power it back on, it doesn't remember to connect the USB dongle again.  I've checked and re-checked my USB settings for the XP VM.  The USB dongle is set to "Connect to Windows" but it refuses to automatically connect when I power on the VM.  It used to work just fine.

I've attached two screenshots of the gray menu bar bug.  I first mentioned it in these forums months ago but it has yet to be fixed.  I think someone mentioned in my original post about the gray menu bar that it was a Mavericks bug; but I haven't encountered the bug with any other software I run full screen in Mavericks.  That leads me to believe that it is, in fact, a VMware Fusion bug.  I'm wondering if anyone else out there is encountering the same problems I'm having?

[wila]

Hi avanpelt

First off, VMware never pre announces if and when a new release will come from any of their products. It is company policy and employees are not allowed to give you a time line. Most likely, the timeline for any release is only known by a few persons anyways.

I understand what you mean if waiting for a bug fix. Sometimes the releases are not as frequent as one would hope, sometimes they don't fix what you think is critical either.

re. your bugs. When in mountain Lion I've not seen this "full screen with a bar" problem since a long time. Just last weekend I rebooted into Mountain Lion and I see it now every time my host resumes from a sleep.

Can't comment on the USB issue as I prefer Fusion to ask me, but I do know that Fusion 6.0.2 introduced several USB regressions in comparison to Fusion 6.0.1. There's a small chance that rolling back to 6.0.1 resolves the issue.

--

Wil

[plasticphyte]

I would double check that you've got the latest VMWare tools installed on the guest OS, or re-install them.

I've found 6.0.2 to be pretty solid for my daily use, but occasionally see some funky stuff happening on my second & third monitors, usually my VM's seem to work better (at least graphically) when they're on the primary display.

[avanpelt]

Thanks for your reply.  I run my VMs exclusively in full screen on external displays.  As a test, I had my Windows 7 VM running in full screen on my external monitor just now.  I closed my laptop screen, opened it back up about ten seconds later, and the gray bar appeared at the top of my VM on the external monitor.

I then moved the VM window over to my MacBook Pro display and made it full screen.  I closed the laptop screen, waited about 10 seconds, and opened it back up.  The VM appeared on my laptop display in full screen without the gray bar at the top.

To further test, I put one of the other apps I use in full screen all the time (BusyCal 2) over onto my external monitor.  I closed the laptop screen, waited 10 seconds, and opened it back up.  There was no gray bar on top of full-screen BusyCal on my external monitor.

Therefore, I can only conclude that this is a bug with the way 6.0.2 handles full-screen mode on external displays.

[avanpelt]

Thanks for your reply.  I'm not running Mountain Lion.  I'm running Mavericks.  I only upgraded to Fusion Pro 6 because Fusion Pro 5 wasn't behaving correctly when I upgraded to Mavericks.  I'm just a little miffed that I basically had no choice but to upgrade to Fusion 6 because Fusion 5 wasn't working properly with the new OS, Fusion 6 introduced these two bugs for me, and VMware has now gone several months without releasing a bugfix version of Fusion.

[plasticphyte]

Yeah, the whole full screen thing seems to be a bit hit & miss in Fusion 6 on Mavericks, which I think is down to the new way Mavericks handles Spaces when multiple monitors are attached.

[shouse]

Ditto on both...especially the USB auto connect! I like to have my work Macs restart nightly, but I don't like having to tell it to connect the my USB software hasp each morning when it should be automatic.

On the gray bar, I haven't tested this very long, but I disabled "Displays have separate Spaces" option in System Prefs > Mission Control, and my fullscreen Fusion seems to be playing well with my 2nd display. However it appears this disables the menu bar and dock availability on the 2nd display, if that makes any difference.

[nancyz]

shouse wrote:

Ditto on both...especially the USB auto connect! I like to have my work Macs restart nightly, but I don't like having to tell it to connect the my USB software hasp each morning when it should be automatic.

Hi shouse,

Welcome to the community.

Perhaps you could re-check the USB settings to let Fusion remember your choice. There are two ways to enable this:

One is to check "Remember my choice and do not ask again" when you plug your USB dongle, the other one is to select "Connect to windows" in your VM USB settings, please see the screenshots.

Hope this helpful.

[shouse]

Thanks Nancy. Unfortunately even after running the 6.0.3 update it still doesn't function like 4.X did for me. I do have my USB hasp selected as you see in my screenshot, but each morning when it resumes the VM, it fails to connect it until I manually tell it to. I have  unchecked and rechecked this preference, rebooted the VM and the Mac Mini it runs on in various sequences. The only thing I haven't done is look for a preferences file to delete, thinking that it may be a fluke with the preferences. Any other suggestions?

[avanpelt]

Interestingly, I've found since upgrading to Fusion 6.0.3 that if the HASP key I use with XP Professional is connected to the XP VM and if I restart Windows via the Start menu, the VM restarts and the HASP key is automatically reconnected to XP (i.e. red light on the HASP key is on when Windows XP starts).

If I shut down the VM through the Start menu and then restart the VM by clicking on the "play" button in Fusion, even though my preferences for the VM are set for the HASP key to "Connect to Windows", it doesn't connect automatically.  I have to go to Virtual Machine --> USB Devices --> Connect Aladdin HASP manually.

[shouse]

Tried it for myself...same results. Seems to make sense that as long as Fusion doesn't quit/restart, the VM itself can restart and it maintains the USB connection. When Fusion quits, however, it relinquishes control back to the OS, and then forgets to connect up again when Fusion is opened again.

I delete my preferences file, go back in and recheck the box with the "Connect to Windows" preference. Then I quit Fusion and it crashes immediately when I reopen it. On second try it opens and resumes as usual, but the box in USB settings is unchecked. I'm guessing there's some conflict with the prefs file.

I'm going to try repairing permissions and if that doesn't work, I think I'll reinstall Fusion from scratch. Call me anal but it's annoying that it used to work and got "upgraded" away!

[shouse]

So I both repaired permissions...and did a clean install. Didn't help. Throw my hands up in the air time.

[avanpelt]

My assumption, then, is that this is a software bug that VMware has to address.  They fixed the issue with the gray bar appearing at the top of the VM window when it's run on an external monitor in full screen.  Now they just have to fix the USB auto-connect issue with guests and Fusion 6.x will finally be at the same place Fusion 5.x was.

[vmdexter]

I can confirm this behavior with the usb device in fusion 6.0.x.

After rebooting a Win7-vm, fusion never remembers the usb settings I did for this vm. The plug-in-action for this device is to connect with the vm and the check box in front of the row is checked. The usb device is a hardware dongle used in the vm needed to run a custom software. After rebooting the vm the check box is always unchecked. I have to check it every time manually and then the the usb device is working properly in the vm. I do know what to do, to get this behavior fix in fusion 6. In older versions of fusion (pre 6.0) it work very nicely.

I opened a support request.

[vmdexter]

Hint: see knowledge base 1648.

[avanpelt]

I read KB article 1648 and the document indicates that the article does not apply to VMware Fusion.  It applies to VMware Player, VMware Server, and VMware Workstation -- not VMware Fusion.

As a side note, I upgraded to Fusion Professional 7.0.0 today and my Aladdin USB dongle still does not auto-connect to my XP VM.  I went into the Advanced Settings area of the USB settings dialog box and clicked Revert to Default Settings and then unplugged my Aladdin key, plugged it back in, told it to "Connect to Windows" and to "Remember my choice and don't ask me again" and the dongle immediately lit up.  However, when I shut down the XP VM via Start --> Shutdown and then restarted the VM by clicking the "Play" button on the Fusion VM screen, XP booted but the Aladdin dongle did not auto-connect to the VM.  I checked the USB settings after XP booted and the Aladdin USB dongle says "Connect to Windows" but there is not a checkmark next to it.  As soon as I click the box next to the dongle to checkmark it, the dongle lights up.

I have opened a support request with VMware.  Hopefully they'll acknowledge and fix this issue.  This was not an issue prior to version 6.0.2.