Seeing "ghost" VM's after starting back up a suspended VM

[jamesnine]

I have just upgraded to OS X Mavericks Golden Master (10.9), and I'm running Fusion 6.0.1.  I have a debian wheezy image and I have it set to auto-start when VMware launches (this is useful after I reboot the machine at times). What ends up happening is that it will create a "ghost" window that is grey and does nothing; however, when you close the "ghost" window, it will shutdown or suspend the VM completely.  Then when you reload it again (from suspension), the "ghost" window re-appears.

Here's a screenshot of the "ghost" window(s) in question:

As you can see, they are just blank grey windows (on the lower left corner).  This is how I was able to duplicate the issue:

1) Set you VM's to suspend when closing it (under General settings for VMware Fusion).

2) Set your debian VM "Start automatically when VMware Fusion launches" (under Virtual Machine -> Settings -> General Icon)

3) Click on the "VMware Fusion" menubar item, and choose "Quit VMware Fusion"

4) Wait for it to Suspend the VM, and completely quit the application; then restart it.

5) While the VM is restarting and "waking" from suspension, move that window, and you will reveal the "ghost" window behind it.

6) If you repeat this process again (without closing any windows; just go repeat step 3-5 again), you will get multiple "ghost" windows (as pictured above).

This has never happened before until I upgraded to Mavericks GM (10.9, build 13A598).  Previous to this, I was running Mountain Lion 10.8.5 and had no problems.

EDIT: The solution to fix the describe image is to completely shutdown the VM (no suspension), then restart it.  But I don't want to have to do this everytime I reboot.  Also, this issue does not appear if I restart VMware in conjunction with another suspended VM (e.g. my other Windows 8 VM).

[admin]

This sounds like a known issue with the OS X window restoration and the new windowing code in Fusion that's specific to Mavericks. If you close all the VM windows before quitting Fusion, or go to System Prefs > General and enable "Close windows when quitting an application", does it go away?

If not, please let me know so I can investigate. Thanks!

[jamesnine]

Yes! That did the trick! Thanks!

However, what's the downside to disabling that feature in Mac OS X anyway?  I think it's left on by default, and I do find it is quite useful.

[admin]

The only downside is that it won't restore your open windows in any of your apps, and as you say it's a useful feature. If you turn that checkbox back off you'll get a a "Quit and Close All Windows" option in all Mac apps - hit the "option" key in the application menu to see it, and do "cmd-option-Q" instead of simple "cmd-Q" to trigger it - which you can use as a temporary workaround. (Cmd-Opt-Q will give you the opposite of that checkbox, so if it's on you'll get "Quit and Keep Windows" instead.)

[jamesnine]

sorry to bring this up again; but apparently just "quitting" the app does not exhibit the problem anymore, but rebooting still brings about the problem--I don't reboot very often, but today I had to due to an EFI update which required a hard reboot.  When reloading VMware (after a reboot), the "ghost" windows re-appeared again!

I double-checked that the "Close windows when quitting an application" checkbox was checked, and it was.  So now I'm back to square one--only when rebooting though.

[admin]

Yes, when you restart the confirmation dialog has a "Reopen windows when logging back in" checkbox that applies regardless of the System Prefs state. From the application's perspective there's no difference between this form of window restoration and the quit/restart one, so when it's fixed it'll be fixed for all cases.