Ctrl-Alt (to direct input back to host OS) stopped working in Player 15.5.5

[lizardpq]

Host: Windows 10

Guest: Xubuntu (VMware Tools installed)

After upgrading to VMware Player 15.5.5 yesterday (and selecting "Enhanced Keyboard Driver", which might be related), I'm having the following two problems:

1. The guest OS no longer seems to recognize Alt keypresses (e.g. to show a window's menu bar), although it still recognizes combinations like Alt-Tab.

2. After I log in to the guest OS (but not before, interestingly), VMware Player no longer responds to Ctrl-Alt as a way to "unfocus" the guest and direct input back to the host. This means the only way I can get out of Player in fullscreen mode is to mouse up to the menu bar at the top.

Is this a known issue? Any advice? Thanks in advance!

Karl

[lizardpq]

Update (workaround found!): This seems to be a problem with Num Lock. When I open Firefox in the guest, type  addEventListener('keydown', e=>console.log(e.key));  in the console, and focus the webpage, I see that an endless stream of NumLock keypresses is being fired. Maybe VMware tools is repeatedly trying and failing to sync the guest's and host's NumLock state by simulating NumLock keypresses which interfere with my attempted Alt actions. When I return to the host and toggle NumLock, the problems stop!

[banackm]

Try setting the following config option:

mks.win32.useInjectedMagic=FALSE

In either your VM's vmx file or your per-user config file.