Virtually Psycho Mouse

Due to the insistence of the IT department and corporate policy, I moved my VMWare Workstation installation formerly on Windows XP Pro SP3 to the VIsaster SP1 computer to continue an ongoing project. Turns out I was justified in my fears of a VMWare Visaster.

I've spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out why a virtual mouse in a VMWare Workstation guest installation of Windows XP Pro SP3 on a Vista SP1 host just didn't work well. You could get one good click out of the mouse then it would go psycho and jump all over the place inside the guest frame. On occasion, the mouse would jump out of the guest frame and onto the host's frame.

On the VMWare web site there were a lot of suggestions to help “de-bounce the mouse”. One that I didn't really understand at all was to disable the VMWare floppy drive and CDROM drives in the guest OS window. It quieted down the mouse somewhat but did not really improve the “grab” function to get the mouse to operate inside the VM.

Complicating the entire mess was the XVGA setup I was attempting to run it on, a dual monitor extended desktop running on a 22” wide-screen Dell monitor with a second 19” standard aspect ratio monitor. The dual port video adapter was an ATI X600 with my choice of 4 Vista drivers, 2 each from DELL or ATI's website. They were all consistent. They all failed exactly the same way.

This exact same video adapter and monitors were used in the XP Pro SP3 system I was previously running VMWare Workstation on. The XP drivers were from DELL and I didn't have any trouble running the VMWare on the XP Pro system with the 2 dissimilar monitors.

I tested a Nvidia 7600 on the Windows XP Pro system and it worked as well as the X600. The problem was that it was too tall to fit into the Visaster system.

The reason for dual monitors was to allow running the application software in its own VM and test all of the new versions as I document their function. If necessary write up the bugs (or “features” Ha!) on the internal bug wiki. A wide desktop area is extremely handy to have for that combo of functionality. Screen captures from the VM are used for both documenting the software functions and as attachments for the bug reports.

The end result of all the testing is that I have a dual port video board that although an excellent board for use under Windows XP, has issues under Vista. I ended up having to remove the board and drop back to a single screen running off the internal video interface adapter, an Intel 945 AGP chip. Removing the dual port adapter and removing the driver eliminated the psycho mouse.

I would whole-heartily agree that if you need good stable VM technology for Windows XP Pro use, VMWare Workstation 6.5 is the best choice, much better than using the free Microsoft VPC-2007. Failures with VPC were numerous and overall the software worked agonizingly slow even on XP Pro.

VMWare Workstation on Vista is noticeably slower than on XP Pro but with a single monitor it works fast enough to not be annoying. If you need to run any VMWare software on a Vista system I would suggest that you download the 30 day trial version and try it out with the video board you will be using with the VM. That should eliminate any guesswork on your part as to whether or not the psycho mouse will come to visit you!