Thanks to Virtual PC’s inability to utilize USB (insert the ‘Old Bit’ siren sound) and my need for USB support in my virtual machines, I’m in the process of moving some VPC images to VMWare Workstation 6. Recently, I’ve converted an existing Virtual PC based XP image to VMWare using the the VMWare 3.0.2 converter with no issues. No issues that is until it was time to install the VMWare tools on my recently converted XP machine. The install went fine, but after the required virtual machine reboot, I found that my mouse pointer was more or less stuck in the bottom right corner of the guest’s screen. The mouse pointer itself moved around freely, but any clicks hit a target off screen. Not a very useful “enhancement”.
Well, it turns out that this may be an issue between the Virtual PC Additions that were already installed on the VPC based image and the VMWare Tools. Specifically, the mouse driver. After some trial and error, I’ve found two workarounds to this:
- Remove Virtual PC Additions from the virtual before conversion to VMWare.
- Install VMWare Tools on the converted virtual without the VMWare Mouse driver. This means that you should install the VMWare Tools while logged into the existing virtual rather than silently via the VMWare menu.
