Keyboard not working in VMWare Fusion w/ Bootcamp (XP Pro Corp)

[UbiquitousPhoto]

First things first, I'm running VMWare version 2.0.1 (12886) on a MBP and a fresh copy of Windows XP SP3 fully patched up within it.

I cant get the keyboard to work in the virtual machine - initially I thought my problem was sending ctrl-alt-del (as I couldnt) to login - the menu option 'send ctrl-alt-del' did nothing either. As the bootcamp xp partition is a member of a domain, I could therefore not log in. I then went in to the bootcamp partition, and disabled the requirement for ctrl-alt-del, and then discovered that no keyboard input was being captured at all.

The mouse (trackpad) works fine within the VM and bootcamp, but the keyboard only works in bootcamp.

Having searched around I have found a few people with similar problems, but very little in the way of answers. During the beta a registry hack was bandied about as a solution to such things - is this still a valid fix?

Could this be a windows driver issue? I went into windows and got it to reinstall the driver (HID complient device) but this had no effect. I can see no VM settings with respect to keyboard, so I presume its not that. I did have parallels installed previously - could this be anything to do with it?

Ironically I came to vmware after a few too many dodgy experiences with parallels (apparently features not bugs) and after installing it on a friends iMac, I was impressed with the power it seemed to give over parallels. And here I am unable to get it working on my MBP I kinda hope there can be a solution to this, as I dont want to go back to parallels with egg on my face as it were.

[UbiquitousPhoto]

Seeing as no-one else has answered this queston really, I will answer it myself seeing as I managed to figure it out.

The thing here is to log in. After a bit of googling, this appears to be the solution for both unworking mice and unworking keyboards, but only if one or the other is not working, I dont know how you would manage to log in if it were both. Note that plugging in an external USB keybaord wont work either until the driver is installed.

I simply created a new XP user account on the local machine under bootcamp, one with no password. If you are attached to a domain, then you can turn off the requirement to have to press ctrl-alt-del to login in the users section of control panel. You then must login to this new account under bootcamp, before rebooting into MacOSX. When you boot the boot camp partition under VMWare, you can then just log into the new account by pressing ok with the mouse. Once logged in, suddenly a whole load of new hardware will be discovered, including an awful lot of pci-pci bridges for some reason.

Once this has finished going off, then install the vmware tools via the menu option, and this should result in the re-enabling of the keyboard. When you reboot after the vmware tools installation you should be able to login normally.