Mouse button gets "stuck" down in VMWare guest OS

Question

I'm using 64-bit Fedora 13 on 64-bit VMWare Workstation 7.1 (on Windows 7 Pro) and I'm having an issue with the mouse button. Everything works just fine unless I click and drag off the guest OS window (which accidentally happens more often than you'd think). When I do this, the "button" gets stuck in the down position and there's no undoing it. Resetting the session does not fix the issue - I have to reboot the VM. I do not have any accessibility features turned on.

Obviously, this is kind of a pain. Does anyone know of a solution?

Answer 1

Ah, I figured it out but I'm going to leave this question up for posterity.

The problem is that when you exit the VMWare window, the mouse "ungrabs" the selection. The guest OS is not informed of this and you get in the stuck condition.

The solution is to go into the VMWare preferences and turn off "ungrab on guest exit" mouse option. The mouse will now be locked into the guest window until you press ctrl-alt to release it properly but there will be no more screwups (and reboots).

Answer 2

There is a better solution to this problem.

Open up /etc/udev/rules.d/69-xorg-vmmouse.rules and replace the line

ACTION=="add|change", ENV=="?*", ATTRS=="i8042 AUX port", PROGRAM="/usr/bin/vmmouse_detect", ENV{ID_INPUT.tags}="vmmouse"

with

ACTION=="add|change", ENV=="?", ATTRS=="i8042 AUX port", KERNEL=="event[0-9]", PROGRAM="/usr/bin/vmmouse_detect", ENV{ID_INPUT.tags}="vmmouse"

And the problem should be gone, without having to give up the easy mouse entry and leaving in your VM.