How do I stop VMware Workstation 6.5 from giving up input focus for no reason on Ubuntu 10.4?

Question

After patching some kernel modules, I got VMware Workstation 6.5.4 running on my Ubuntu 10.4 x86_64 machine. However, now my Windows XP SP3 guest instance cannot keep mouse input captured for any length of time. I can sometimes activate a control in the guest if a double click very quickly, but it's not reliable (and extremely annoying).

Everything appears to be fine in Unity; the problem just appears when I'm running the instance in the VMware window.

Answer 1

I believe I solved the problem. In essence, you have to tell VMware to use the shipped version of GTK by setting the value of the VMWARE_USE_SHIPPED_GTK environment variable to "yes". I added the following line to my /usr/bin/vmware script:

export VMWARE_USE_SHIPPED_GTK=yes

I found the technique here: http://blog.creonfx.com/linux/vmware-player-workstation-mouse-grab-input-focus-bug