I've run into a minor annoyance where I will be working in a VM guest, then use the mouse to click on an application on the native host. I then want to begin typing, but nothing appears. Finally, I remember that I now appear to need to hit the <Ctrl>-<Alt> keystroke to pop the keyboard out of the guest and then I can begin typing. It doesn't seem to occur all the time, just some of the time--often enough to be annoying.
I'm running a Dell workstation with multiple cores and lots of memory. Windows 7, SP1 on both the host and the guest. (Professional edition on the guest and Enterprise on the host.) I'm running with two different-sized monitors. One is 2560x1440 resolution and the other is 2560x1600. Host's main desktop (icons, taskbar and start button) is on the smaller one, the guest is full-screen on the larger one. Keyboard is a Dell with a Smart Card Reader. On the host: the mice (one for each hand--I like to switch around) are both "Evoluent VerticalMouse" under "Mice and other pointing devices" in Device Manager (both are Vertical Mouse 2). The Keyboards has a "HID Keyboard Device", and the "Smart card readers" section has "Smart Card Reader Keyboard". The "Human Interface Devices" section include a "Evouent VerticalMouse 2", a "Evoluent VerticalMouse 3", and a "USB Input Device".
On the virtual guest, there are two "Human Interface Devices", both are "USB Inpurt Device", the "Keyboards" contain only one "Unknown device", the "Mice and other pointing devices" contain one "VMware Pointing Device", and two "VMware USB Pointing Device". Once I connect the "Shared Dell Smart Card Reader Keyboard 0" using VMware Workstation's "Removable devices" menu, then the guest's "Device Manager" under "Smart card readers" has a "Microsoft Usbcid Smartcard Reader (WUDF)".
Both systems are members of the corporate domain. I've seen this behavior with virtual machines that are connected using NAT and virtual machines that are bridged.
Hope that helps.
Thanks!
Lowell
