VMWare Player mouse becomes erratic

vmware-player

I have been experiencing a problem with VMWare Player 3.1.6

This is on a Panasonic Toughbook CF53 the Host OS is Windows XPSP3 fully updated, The Guest os is Windows XPSP3 fully updated.

It seems that randomly in the guest the mouse cursor becomes completely erratic and uncontrollable moving randomly around the screen. The mouse while uncontrollable in the guest works fine in the host. The only way to fix it is to reboot the guest machine numerous times as the problem may still be there after a reboot.

I have tried:

reinstalling the vmware guest tools.
updating the hosts's machines mouse driver.
reinstalling the host's and guests mouse driver
Changeing guests hardware accelation to one from top ( this disables mouse pointer accelaration)

None of the above works. I have been at this for days now. Anyone got any ideas on what to try next. I cannot upgrade to the next Major version of VMWare Player.

Best Answer

Disable Write Combines in the advanced Display properties in your XP VM.

Related Solutions

Running OVF on VMware Player

Asked the same question on the VMware Community Forum and got the answer. Turns out that because OVF is not a runtime format, it needs to be converted back to VMX format for Player to be able to run it. I guess ESXi and VMware server can do this themselves on loading the OVF. See details in the forum.

Networking – Installing VMWare Tools on VMWare Player

Do you use a proxy on the host machine? I believe that that error means that it is attempting to download the latest version of the tools (from outside of the vm, the vm's settings does not affect this step at all) as it does not come packaged with the installer you must download it at least once, and that download is failing.

Check your network settings or see if there is a way to download the iso image of the tools directly. (I do not know what EULA says about the redistribution of the iso images so I won't link directly to a uploaded copy of my own, but if anyone else is brave enough...)

If you have vmware player installed on another computer the file you need to copy is

C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Player\windows.iso
and
C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Player\windows.sig

That file will not be there on your machine (that is the entire reason you are getting the error, it is trying to download it for the first time and is failing)

I found where you can download the ISO, VMware's repository is here.

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