Mouse problem in Parallels 5

I turned on "Smart Mouse".

I then used the Virtual Machine Menu to bind the Apple Keyboard / Trackpad to the VM.

The VM is running Windows 7.

Now the mouse cursor won't show what the mouse is doing. There *is* a cursor: When I move my finger on the trackpad, I can find the Windows Start menu by trial and error, and clicking on the Windows Start button opens the Start menu - but the mouse cursor just stays put in one area of the screen, it never moves. Therefore I can't see where the pointer is.

This does not happen when I turn off "Smart Mouse". (But that's no good as turning off Smart Mouse prevents the cursor for being visible in games that I play full screen and that come with a custom cursor: Warhammer 40,000 Dawn of War and Battle for Middle-Earth).

 

I guess that is not a "smart" mouse. Thrade it in for LInux.

 

I want to do Windows, not Linux on this machine.

And the mouse *is* rather smart - it's just not very good: Any animated mouse pointers (e.g. when Windows is "busy") are quite jerky. When I turn off Smart Mouse (thus in essence disabling the "Smart Mouse" part of the driver) the mouse pointer animation is a whole lot smoother, about as smooth as you'll get in any Windows installation on a regular PC.

 

Similar problem in Ubuntu 9.10 VM

I have a similar problem in my Ubuntu 9.10 VM with P5. I created an Ubuntu 9.04 VM and then allpied all 9.04 updates. After thast was done I rebooted and used Ubuntu Update Manager to move up to 9.10. After update process rebooted, I found that I could no longer see the cursor in Ubuntu VM. It is ther because, as above, I could randomly bump into buttons and click but I cannot see the cursor icon at all in Ubuntu. If I press Alt-Ctrl, the Mac cursor returns and seems to work normally in Mac OS X (10.5.4).

Any ideas on how to fix this?

 

Problem is no longer present

Well, when I went home and had the time, I powered down the VM, P5 and the real machine. When I powered up and restarted everything --- the problem had gone away! Go figure.

 

Seems to be SmartMouse setting causing the issue

At least on my system. I installed Ubuntu 9.10 and after the first software update I noticed as described above that the cursor was no longer visible, yet still active, in my Ubuntu VM.

After looking through the Parallel configuration options I came across the SmartMouse and switched it from 'Auto' to 'Off'. PRESTO! My mouse cursor is back! To validate this was the issue, I shutdown Ubuntu and switched SmartMouse back to 'Auto'. The problem returned. The problem also reappears if the SmartMouse 'On' setting is used.

Wondering if there is something in the Parallel tools that got overwritten during the update. Unfortunately I have no clue yet where or how I'd find that out.

 

works

Turning off Smart Mouse worked for me too. Thanks for the tip. Now to figure out why I have no internet connection after the latest update to build 9344 in Parallels 5.