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Nimral201110141
Contributor
Contributor

What *exactly* is the "Enhanced Keyboard Driver" for

This is a very basic question, I know, but I haven't find a satisfactory answer, so maybe someone can clarify.

The driver is installed in my host, and does hook into the standard keyboard driver chain. This does sound a little scary to me, knowing Microsoft's habit to change Windows internals at will and not caring too much wether competing products are broken or not. So if the driver doesn't do any good for me, I'd rather not install it.

The docs do say, thet the driver does "somehow" do "something" good for foreign language keyboards. Well, I have a foreign language keyboard (German), in fact I have plenty of them (very basic ones as well as "Multimedia" keyboards with tons of special keys, mainly made by Microsoft and Logitech, but also other brands), and I have never noticed any difference between hosts with and without the Enhanced Keyboard Driver.

This may be caused by the fact that I hardly ever use any "Enhanced" functionality inside a VM, but I notice that many special keys like volume controls, Windows key, Alt-Gr key work regardless of whether I install teh Enhanced Keboard driver or not.

So can anybody clarify why I need this driver, and what kind of malfunction I will experience if I don't install it?


Thx, Armin.

7 Replies
continuum
Immortal
Immortal

> and what kind of malfunction I will experience if I don't install it?
I do not install the "enhanced keyboard driver" since it was added. This driver requires a reboot after install and I also do not know what it really is good for.
I recommend not to install it - if you ever come across a function that requires this driver you can install it later.
In other words - dont worry - do nothing !
Ulli


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knaseer
Contributor
Contributor

I was searching for this answer myself for a long time, just out of curiosity, that what new feature or value will it bring, turns out that this is a feature which may not be needed by most of us.

Configuring Keyboard Features

The enhanced virtual keyboard feature provides better handling of international keyboards and keyboards that have extra keys. This feature is available only on Windows host systems.

admin
Immortal
Immortal

The primary purpose of the host keyboard driver is to allow Ctrl+Alt+Del and Win+L to work from within the guest OS without it being intercepted by the Windows host OS.

The secondary purpose is to handle international keyboards better.

knaseer
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks jameslin​ it does make sense now.

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mszeu
Contributor
Contributor

Yes you're right but the part where it talks about security seems interesting as well:

Because it processes raw keyboard input as soon as possible, the enhanced virtual keyboard feature also offers security improvements by bypassing Windows keystroke processing and any malware that is not already at a lower layer. When you use the enhanced virtual keyboard feature, only the guest operating system acts when you press Ctrl+Alt+Delete

Kind regards,

Marco (StockTrader on most of the forums)

matteoguglielmi
Contributor
Contributor

Since I've installed this driver during the last update of wks 14 I noticed that

copying text (select + right-click -> copy) from both chrome and firefox browsers

but also text editors such as sublimetext, notepad and notepad++ does not work.

I have always to copy the selected text twice before pasting it somewhere else.

Anybody having the same problem here?

How to uninstall this driver?

Or is it this problem related to something completely different?

I'm running windows 10, latest patch level.

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yanw
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

I can not reproduce your "copying test" issue on my Win10 host with "Enhanced Keyboard Driver" installed. You can uninstall it by following steps and verify if that relates to your problem:

1) Launch Workstation installer from Windows Control Panel

2) Click "Next" and choose "Change" option

3) Unselect the "Enhanced Keyboard Driver" and continue the following steps

4) Reboot your host

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