TOUCH KEYBOARD FIX FOR VMWARE
For anyone having the Touch Keyboard Toolbar problem with VMware. The solution is very simple.
VMware adds Touchscreen support to the standard hardware for the guest even if the host machine doesn't have Touchscreen support. That's why VMware VMs using Windows 8 automatically have "Pen and Touch" and "Tablet PC Settings" in the Control Panel and also why the Virtual Keyboard Toolbar keeps showing up in the taskbar.
The virtual touchscreen hardware is available even before VMware Tools is installed and Windows is always trying to install the drivers for it.
There are two options to get rid of the Touchscreen driver
1. Go to the Device Manager / Human Interface Devices
- Right-click Properties on each "USB Input Device" until you find the one with the format:
Port_#0001 Hub_#0003
- Right-click / Disable that device (This is the VMware Touchscreen device)
2. The better solution to completely stop the Touchscreen device from trying to load:
- Shut down the Virtual Machine
- Open up the Virtual Machine .vmx file into notepad.
Find the line:
touchscreen.vusb.present = "TRUE"
and change it to read:
touchscreen.vusb.present = "FALSE"
- Save the .vmx file. Restart the Virtual Machine.
With the "FALSE" setting, the Touchscreen device won't even try to load in the first place and the Device Manager won't even list the device. This also gets rid of "VMware Virtual HiD" from Control Panel / Devices and Printers.
Both of these will disable Touchscreen support in the Virtual Machine. It will also automatically make the virtual machine a non-touch screen computer so "Pen and Touch" and "Tablet PC Settings" will automatically be removed from the Windows 8 Control Panel.
Also, if you go to: Charms Menu / Settings / Change PC settings / General section
The Touch keyboard section and Spelling section will no longer be available. One last thing it will do is get rid of 3 or 4 Event Viewer errors on each restart:
Event ID 262: A pointer device did not report a valid unit of coordinate measurement.
Event ID 255
Event ID 256
So Event Viewer is a lot cleaner without the Touchscreen driver always trying to load and failing.
It would have been nice if some of this was documented by VMware. But now you know why the Touch Keyboard Toolbar keeps appearing and a bunch of other things that aren't needed at all if you don't have a Touchscreen!