Mouse cursor gets STUCK in VM

[UserOfVirtualMa]

VMware Fusion 11.5.5 on macOS Catalina. When a virtual machine is booted, the mouse cursor often gets STUCK in the VM. This occurs with Windows and Linux guests.

The mouse remains STUCK until you do both of these things: (1) push Command+Control to manually release mouse cursor, and (2) Resize the VM window.

If you don't resize the VM window, clicking back in the window makes mouse cursor STUCK again.

[wila]

Hi,

This can be two things (from the top of my head)

1. VMware Tools isn't properly installed and is having issues, or

- in this case more likely as you report to see this on more than 1 VM -

2. The mouse settings under menu "VMware Fusion" -> Preferences -> Gaming are not set to "Auto-detect mouse for games"

hope this helps,

--

Wil

[kushner]

I finally figure this out for my configuration. I have a Wacom and there was suggestion a long while ago (Fusion 4) to add "mks.allowCursorConstraining=FALSE" to the vmx file. I took this out and the mouse started to work normally for me.

Fusion 4.0.1 and Wacom Intuos3 tablet

[gringley]

A while back the mouse cursor started getting stuck inside my 32-bit Windows VMs.  I had to Control-Command to get the mouse back out of the 32-bit VM.  I kind of accepted that this was a symptom of 32-bit slowly dying.  I found that "Never optimize mouse for games" returned my mouse to normal in 32-bit VMs.

[RhinoBo]

Glad I found this. I had it on auto-detect or always optimize, which is the option I used in Parallels.

[pfattoreFinkl]

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@wila wrote:

The mouse settings under menu "VMware Fusion" -> Preferences -> Gaming are not set to "Auto-detect mouse for games"

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For those using VMware Workstation, this also worked for me. My scenario was connecting to a remote vCenter Server. It's a server that cannot be restarted at the moment, but kept locking/holding onto mouse. Could only exit with CTRL + ALT. However, setting this in Workstation fixed it:

Preferences -> Input -> Optimize mouse for gaming: Never