Does anyone have a list of all the drivers that are installed by the automatic TOOLS process in windows? I think I may have in my tedious hours of fighting with the couple of problems on my system come across a working, if somewhat egregiously tiring fix. It requires removing drivers one at a time and I have only struggled with a few of them and do not possess a master list of them all. If anyone can post this, I will incorporate it into my proposed solution. But here is what I think is going on with all these different and seemingly unrelated issues. I believe the tools installer itself is the problem. I have installed and uninstalled using the tools and using brand new parallels downloads more than 10 times in the last few days to no avail. On on of the many threads one user posted that I should manually remove and install the offending driver. This worked but not without other problems. The problem it seems is that the tools installer does not do a very good job... sometimes. The solution is to manually remove, restart, reinstall, remove and install selected drivers one at a time. An UGLY process that has consumed nearly my entire evening. But... I am nearly done with the test and if it works following this next reboot... It presents a work around for what I believe are MANY of the problems that have stumped us all. Cheers !
I regret to report.... the process was unsucessful. The reboot to the VM resulted in the lose of mouse control and focus yet again. It is obviously a driver issue. Uninstalling it, fixes the problem, but of course created all the expected issues of not having video depth and controls. Reinstalling manually worked and no reboot was required. But, upon a reboot to test the sucess, the problem returned the same as it was... another day lost trying to troubleshoot this in the dark. :::sigh:::
Don't know if this will help you, BUT I always install the latest drivers using Windows SAFE Mode and log in a Administrator. Have never had a problem using this approach. ajm
I'm beginning to think the problem might be coming from some sort of OS X level conflict that eventually makes Parallels unstable. One way to test this theory would be to have Rachel's VM put on another Mac with a clean Parallels installation.
My VM is on a firewire drive. I could easliy test that as I have more than one mac. But they are not the same type of mac. Tell me more... I am running 2.5 fine on my other macs and have NOT wanted to take the risk after this nightmare.
While I did not do that THIS FIRST time... I have tried to do so in the many many repairs. Something is hosed and it won't get up !! LOL
FYI: Because this is on multiple threads.... I have 6 VMs on this iMac 24. All on a firewire 800. 3 are XP. 1 of the 3 is a TRANSPOTED copy of my best former PC. That is the one with the problem. I upgraded the others yesterday to see and they converted to 3.0 and installed flawlessly. Something is different with the transport, likely some previous setting that worked with 2.5 that does not work with 3.0 But, that would explain ONLY my issue. As there are dozens of similar posts by other members, I do not think it likely that it is exclusive to transport, but I provide this detail just in case.
I am not sure if Parallels can run if OS X is running in Safe Mode (and I am too lazy to try it right now), but it may be worth a try to boot in OS X safe mode and then run Parallels. Networking will not work at all but you may be able to see if the mouse / video issue remains.
Did the transported PC have any mouse / special video drivers installed on it (dell mouse, logitech mouse, nVidia drivers etc)? Do you still have the original PC? If so try uninstalling all non required drivers / programs and see if that image has the same problem.
I do not have the original PC, as I sold it when the VM was working fine for months in version 2. No special drivers or devices either. It was an Acer 1712 Laptop with Desktop components. Very standard stuff inside. According to the hardware configurer there are no other drivers anymore... I do not know how Transporter works, but whatever it did, WORKED and there is no remnant that I can see of any other hardware drivers, except Parallels.
When you are experiencing the issue (i.e. not after the fix of installing tools for that one time use), open up Windows Device Manager (right click my computer -> properties -> hardware tab -> device manager). Open up the following items by clicking the plus sign. Computer, Display Adapters, Mice and other pointing devices. They should be as follows with no other items in them: Standard PC, Parallels Video Driver, Parallels Mouse Synchronization Tool. If there are any other drivers listed, remove them. If you are brave, you may want to backup your VM and try some testing on a copy as this sounds a lot like somewhere in Windows it still thinks it has a different mouse / video card. I've had issues with ESX server (Vmware's high end server platform) when transporting live servers over to become virtual ones. Sometimes (sometimes being the key here) something gets wonky and the registry does not get properly cleaned of the old drivers. One of my migrated servers had to have vmware tools installed every time we restarted it. A check of device manager showed everything looked as it should, but searching the registry for 'Dell' showed a plethora of Dell drivers still listed and loading. You could try a registry cleaner. Just pointing out some ideas whilst you wait and wait for support to get back to you.
Transporting windows from one physical machine to another has always given a spotty result at best. This is why I never do it to with any of my customers machine. If you insist on doing it, one of the things you have to do is to go to your transported machine device manager and DELETE every one of those devices. This will force windows to re-discover every piece of physical hardware. By the way make sure you create a backup of your VM. This has been known to sometime hose a physical machine. At least with a virtual you can make a backup before trying Good luck
@Rachel: Wow, being so constructive the last few days. That certainly is a nice change instead of just being, ah, "loud". Keep it up Unfortunately I have no constructive input regarding your mouse focus problem
From what I understand of this problem I think the issue is most likely with the registry. It might be possible to come up with a generic fix, but unfortunately I don't have much experience messing with the registry. Has anyone with the mouse issues tried a clean install of Windows, and if so, does it solve the problem?
LOL I am the quintessential extremist in all things. Good, bad and ugly. As for my loud 72 hours... I had more than 9 MONTHS of being a nice fan girl first. After TPTB responded to me at last... I played nice again. This is as it should be. Sadly... none of the things have worked. Though I do not have a very good registry editor to try THAT. But as for the generic drivers, ONLY Parallels stuff is listed and folks.... Understand this key point. I transported to 2.5 and worked with it FINE for several updates there. It is only this "upgrade" to 3.0 which has resulted in this problem.... Further... There are NO LESS THAN 20 other posts by other people with this SAME or nearly same problem.... I am the only Transported VM in that list. It's a BUG in the Tools installer. Word !
I have two other VMs and they upgraded FINE and work correctly on this SAME iMac with this SAME 3.0 Unfortunately, one of those is my generic windows in case I test something and the other is special for a couple of programs that I only need on occasion and are rather LARGE and I didn't put them on my old Acer that I transported. Its my Acer Transport that has ALL my hundreds of specialize Cnet downloaded little apps that would take me YEARS to replace if they even COULD be all found again. So it worked 2 times and not 3.... That means an install issue.
If anyone from the Parallels team reads this, please consider including an option to clean the registry of Parallels Tools related entries when Parallels Tools are uninstalled. I've tried to locate all the Parallels Tools registry entries, but the registry is just too much of a mess!
That would be a very good Idea too. I used to have Norton Tools on an older system it had a good registry editor with back ups etc... but I haven't used Norton since they got bought up. That's why I have asked for the drivers here. At least then I could look for THEM and try one at a time. But I think the issue is far greater than just a corrupt driver. I think that blaming a driver install has been a wild goose chase.
