W xp on Player: How to change Keyboard Driver?

[METsen]

I installed W xp on the Player and it appears to function well, except that using the keyboard is now a little bit quirky. When installing W xp the procedure suggested to install the German keyboard. This was almost, but unfortunately not quite correct. The installed driver relates to this keyboard here https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/German/Appendices/Keyboard Note the remark below the figure: "German and Austrian keyboard layout, but remember that Switzerland does not use this layout." My computer does acually have this "odd" one, namely the Swiss-German keyboard as shown here https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:KB_Swiss.svg  Do I have chance to get finally a correct driver working?

FYI: Looking at the installed keyboard drivers in my W7prof shows:

i8042prt.sys

kbdclass.sys

VMkbd.sys

I presume that the last two drivers where added during the Player installation.

[METsen]

Not being able to use the correct keyboard driver for the Player turns out to be a no-go criteria for working with the Programming Environment on the VMware Player. There are just too many "sign keys" which are different. I decided finally to continue to do this work on the Windows XP Mode. The quirks I encounter when using the Programming Environment on the XP mode are a smaller handicap compared to working with wrong keyboard on the VMware Player.

[RDPetruska]

I'm confused... why did you select that particular keyboard when installing XP inside your guest OS?  Don't use Easy Install - it often causes more headaches than it helps... use the Custom Install instead, then just do your normal OS installation inside your VM.

[METsen]

It's the VMware Player installation procedure which selected the wrong keyboard driver. When the procedure indicated it during the installation I feared to stop the running installation and pressed "continue"; I was hoping to be able to change it afterwards. That was the reason for posting this thread. Not having received a reply during the past few days I assumed that there would not exist a feasable solution. How do I continue now from here? Does it need a new installation of the Player (or Workstation)? Or how else can I change the keyboard driver so that the VMware Player uses the same as the Windows XP Mode?

[RDPetruska]

Are you saying that when you installed VMware Player on your host, that it changed the keyboard layout / language for your host OS?  Or that it's when you installed Win XP inside your guest OS running inside of VMware Player?

How did you create the VM?  Was it a brand new install, or did you import the XP mode instance?

[METsen]

I do not remember at which moment during the installation I was informed that the keyboard driver "German" would be installed. Looking afterwards at the installed keyboard drivers in my W7prof showed: i8042prt.sys, kbdclass.sys and VMkbd.sys. I assume that the last two of them were added somewhen along this installation. Note that the installation only changed the keybord driver for the guest; the host (and also Windows XP Mode) use still the correct driver.

The installation is a first one and followed the instructions which I received in this thread here https://communities.vmware.com/message/2298568#2298568 namely installing Player without Workstation and using VMware vCenter Converter Standalone Client for "handling" the existing Windows XP Mode.

[METsen · Accepted solution]

Just in case someone stumbles over this thread. Before asking here for help I tried to solve the problem by adjusting the language/region-settings in W xp on the Player. Not having succeeded I blaimed VMware having installed a wrong driver. I am ashamed to admit that the problem was not VMware but rather me not having adjusted in W xp the language/region-settings correctly. Now having it done how one is supposed to do it, the keyboard works fine. Sorry.