Fedora – Autostart under random WM

This is largely a guess, so take this all with a pinch of salt.

I encountered something that may be related where, when vmware was configured to 'grab' and 'release' the keyboard/mouse when the cursor moved in and out of the vmware window. I switched using a specific keypress to grab and release. Basically, in the preferences under keyboard/input control I unchecked most of the options. (I recall switching from the default control+alt to something else, because I suspected a window manager key binding was conflicting somehow.)

At the very, absolute worst, figure out how to add a global startup item that on your centos machine's that executes a script containing:

{ while sleep 2; do xset r on; done } &

Good luck!

P.S. When I had the similar problem, before I figured how to fix it, I would just ssh into my guest linux VMs or rdesktop into my guest windows VMs. In the end, I found that approach to be much nicer. Certainly made it gobs easier to move files back and forth using ssh ControlSockets or the rdesktop -r disk: redirection. Just a thought.

[Edit: Potentially worthwhile details I discovered.]

While poking around trying to find evidence proving GTK at fault, I used strings on the binaries to find a poorly documented configuration statement to increase MKS (mouse keyboard screen) logging. Then I discovered the following strings:

MKS Keyboard: Reset auto-repeat = %d
MKS Keyboard: Restore on-grab auto-repeat = %d
MKS Keyboard: Restore power-on auto-repeat = %d
MKS Keyboard: Auto-repeat = %d
MKS Keyboard: Saved power-on global_auto_repeat = %d
MKS Keyboard: On-grab global_auto_repeat = %d
MKS Keyboard: Saved on-grab global_auto_repeat = %d

Clearly, formatting for conditional log messages. Unfortunately, I've been unable to reproduce your problem so I can't test this myself, but near those log messages I found another string, I suspect a configuration file label. Try adding this to your ~/.vmware/preferences and your VM's .vmx file

mks.x.saveAutoRepeatEveryGrab = "TRUE"

I don't know what that statement causes and it may be the default condition - the very opposite may be necessary. These might enable the logging that would pin the problem down. I don't know if they belong in the VMX or in the preferences, so I would add them to both.

mks.x.printXError = "TRUE"
mks.dbg = "TRUE"
mks.mksDbg = "TRUE"

If you do discover what was causing this, please do let me know.

Good Luck.