Starting with Fusion 5, a bug introduced itself regarding multiple monitors, Windows XP, running on 10.6.x. This issue had not existed in Fusion 4.
When using a Macbook Pro with an external monitor, disconnect the external monitor cable and close the lid on the Macbook immediately (within a couple seconds). The machine will go to sleep. Open the lid and awaken the Macbook. VMWare Tools running on the Windows XP guest OS is now "hosed". You can see this in the fact that Unity will be disabled and double-clicking any items in Finder that normally open inside the guest OS fail to do anything.
Only two things restore the VMWare Tools:
1. Restarting the Guest OS.
-or-
2. Running the following commands and waiting about 10s-15s.
| Restart VMWare Tools Service |
|---|
taskkill /F /IM vmtoolsd.exe ping 1.1.1.1 -n 1 -w 5000 > NUL sc start vmtools start c:\Progra~1\VMware\VMware~1\vmtoolsd.exe -n vmusr |
This issue is somewhat frustrating, because when I'm at work I have an external monitor, and when I go home, I yank the cords out of the side, close the lid, and pack up. Therefore every day since I upgraded to Fusion 5 I've had to deal with this.
I have not tried to reproduce the issue on any Guest OS other than Windows XP. I have also not tried on any Host OS other than OS X 10.6. However, I don't think the issue is limited to either version. I suspect what is happening is that when disconnecting the external monitor, VMWare Fusion is triggering a desktop resize, however, during the process of determining the number of monitors, we close the lid on the Macbook. When the lid is closed, there are no monitors and therefore no dimensions to resize the desktop to. The VMWare Tools app runs into some kind of null value because of an assumption of having at least one monitor and therefore gets "hosed up". By restarting the VMWare Tools service, it fixes the issue.
Has anyone else run into this?