VMWare player grabbing mouse focus

I am using the newest VMWare player on a Windows 7 machine. When I have the player open on one of my two monitors I get some weird behavior.

For instance, if the player is open on monitor 2, and I minimize firefox on monitor 1, my mouse will instantly switch to the monitor 2 and be centered within the VMWare player window.

This happens when I minimize any window after having been working in my VM. I hope there is a setting or tweak that I am not aware of that can remedy this.

EDIT: Through more testing I have found that this only occurs when the VMWare player is full screen on either of my two monitors.

Also, I found people having the exact same issue at: http://communities.vmware.com/message/1244913

Bryan Rowe

Posted 2009-11-17T15:51:08.427

Reputation: 161

Answers

Although this tip is for Vista, it may still work in 7:

http://www.nordichardware.com/news,1644.html

Be careful inside the registry and dont change anything besides what the website tells you to.

Its only a minor change, you may have to restart your comptuer to experiance the effect.

Tanner Collin

Posted 2009-11-17T15:51:08.427

Reputation: 105

This did not work unfortunately. – Bryan Rowe – 2009-11-18T16:12:57.297

Ok when you get your mouse out of the VM, try minimizing the VM window. Then it should stop it from stealing the focus of other windows. – Tanner Collin – 2009-11-18T22:36:32.747

Sure, but what if I have Visual Studio full screen on my VM and then on my host I have a few windows open that I am using to help me work in Visual Studio IE: chrome, ms project, outlook, etc? – Bryan Rowe – 2009-11-20T20:13:22.613

The page @Tanner Collin originally suggested seems to be returning 404 errors now, but I did find it in the waybackmachine.

I also had a look for other pages detailing how to prevent windows stealing focus. There are a number out there, including these at about.com and howtodothings.com.

Also, this forum thread is interesting, since it describes problems with applications resetting this setting.

Mark Booth

Posted 2009-11-17T15:51:08.427

Reputation: 2 324