Guest screen shows up and "replaces" screen image from host OS after switching desktops

[erikschorr]

I've got Windows XP Pro running in a guest in Workstation 7.1 (Linux, with 3D accel disabled) running on its own Gnome desktop. When I hit the vmware hotkey (ALT+WIN in my case), then switch to one of the other four Gnome virtual desktops on my host, the screen image from the vmware guest shows up on the other desktop. It completely replaces the image I should see of the Gnome desktop. When I click around, I can tell that I'm clicking on things in Gnome, but the image is still from the vmware guest.

If instead, I hit the hotkey to show the vmware toolbar at the top of the screen, then "iconify" the guest, it STILL does it. It minimizes the guest, but then immediately displays it again over the current gnome desktop (just the image, not clickable). I have to click at the bottom of the screen where the VMWare Workstation window is iconified to, to restore it and continue working.

The only way to reliably switch away from a guest without its video interacting with the host, is to hit the hotkey, then hit "restore" to switch the guest into the workstation manager console window. Only then can I switch desktops or minimize workstation without the guest's video coming up on top again. This is a pain to have to do every time I want to switch away from the guest.

The host is an Athlon II dual-core system with ATI radeon HD4200, running CentOS 5.4 64bit, and ATI's radeon driver for Xorg. I'm going to attempt to disable 3d accel support for the guest's vmx and see if that helps. I don't believe this problem was happening when I was using Xorg's stock ATI driver.

Has anyone else seen this happen? Is there a workaround that doesn't disable 3D acceleration?

[wila]

Hi,

Welcome to the VMware community forums.

From workstation release notes

There are known issues with the ATI Linux driver 10.2. VMware recommends that you use ATI Linux driver 9.11 for the best 3D user experience.

I can't say I've seen your issue, but I've had serious problems with an ATI HD2400 series card on some VM's 3D acceleration caused programs to stop working. That was with the 10.5 driver. I've also read somewhere else on this forum that the 10.6 driver is pretty good, but I've not had a chance to test it yet. Guess I will soon as i'm about to replace my ATI card with a HD4200 series...

So you might want to try either the 9.11 driver or the 10.6 one.

Hope this helps,

--
Wil
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