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autofit & tools

I'm getting very frustrated with VMware today.  I'm at a point that I'm willing to toss the product if another desktop-class hypervisor becomes available.

My main issue right now is that one of my W7 guests will not autofit, period.

I started this year out with a pre-existing PC, dual-monitors, Windows 7, VMware Workstation 10, although I usually run my VMs in Player.  I run several VMs, mixed OSes, including three W7 guests.

My working style is to put the VM I need at the moment on my primary display, full-screen, and shove the other VMs into windowed mode on the secondary display.

With the old W7 system I had, I had zero autofit problems - any VM that I full-screened on the primary display autosized to the full size of that display.

That PC died, and its replacement was Windows 8.1.  Same dual-monitor arrangement, same versions of VMware Workstation and Player.

For this, one of my three W7 guests stopped autofitting; it would only take resolution-setting from inside the guest.  No amount of vmware-tools reinstallation helped.  I went so far as to do this:

1.  Remove vmware-tools, and reboot

2.  Remove the Display Adapters, including removing drivers, and reboot.  Power down after reboot.

3.  Strip all video-related settings from the .vmx file.  Boot up.

4.  Install vmware-tools, and reboot

After all of that, the guest STILL does not autofit.  The kicker is that it is only one of three W7 guests, it just so happens that it's my "main" guest, and the one I really want to use full-screen more than the others.

This past weekend, I dove in and upgraded the W8.1 host to W10.  The existing installs of VMware Workstation and Player were not happy (virtual networking was toast), so I removed them, and installed VMware Workstation Player 12, which resolved the virtual network issues.

I figured I would give things another shot and try to fix the autofit problem.  I've done the entire procedure described above, except now the version of VMware-tools that installs with VMWP12 onto the W7 guest causes it to blue-screen during bootup.  I'm just glad I had

a recent backup of that VM.

I'm at my wit's end here.  I want autofit working on this one guest - autofit works on every other guest, so I don't think it's unreasonable to want that.  Also, the tools v10 drivers crash my W7 guest, so that is a problem as well.  I tried locating the tools v9.6.2 that is still running on my other guests, but naturally it's completely gone.

(this is also my second attempt to post this here, which has also not improved my view of Vmware right now)

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