I am using a Logitech G9 mouse and running VMWare Workstation 6.5.3 on Vista x64. The guest OS is Win XP, and has the most current version of VMWare Tools installed. Left / right buttons and mouse wheel scrolling work fine in the guest OS, but the back / forward buttons are apparently not recognized.
I have tried installing the Logitech software inside the guest OS as well, but it still did not recognize the back / forward buttons. (I didn't really expect this to work since the guest OS doesn't actually see the mouse hardware as a Logitech G9 directly anyway.)
I vaguely remember seeing something a while back about editing the virtual machine config file to specify a 5-button mouse rather than the default 3-button setup, but I can't seem to find any specifics on how to do so in the VMWare documentation. Does anyone know if such a workaround exists, or is 5-button mouse functionality just not supported?
Best Answer
After adding usb.generic.allowHID = TRUE to the vmx file, just enable USB for that VM and then go to the Hardware Manager (guest system) and "scan for hardware changes". New USB Devices will then be recognized by the VM and after that your back/forward buttons should work without deactivating the mouse in the host system.