Coherence/Start Menu in Dock not working?

S

snivbonk

Bit poster
What is supposed to happen when I choose "Start Menu" in the Dock Parallels menu? As it stands, nothing discernible happens.

- I'm running the official 2.5 build.
- I'm running XP.
- I've installed the Parallel Tools
- I'm in Coherence mode
- I've disabled the display of the Windows Task Bar in the View menu.

According to the User Guide, "If you clear the check box, you will be able to open the Windows Start menu by clicking the virtual machine icon in the Dock".

So again, what is supposed to happen when I do this?
- Should the Start Menu appear in my Dock menu ?
- Should the Start Menu appear in "Windows".
- Something else?

Is there a bug on my setup, or am I missing something?

TIA.
 
snivbonk said:
According to the User Guide, "If you clear the check box, you will be able to open the Windows Start menu by clicking the virtual machine icon in the Dock".

So again, what is supposed to happen when I do this?
- Should the Start Menu appear in my Dock menu ?
- Should the Start Menu appear in "Windows".
- Something else?

Is there a bug on my setup, or am I missing something?
Click to expand...
Do a long click on the virtual machine icon or a ctrl-click or a right-click, in the context menu you will have Start Menu. Choose that and your XP start menu opens.
 
Olivier said:
Do a long click on the virtual machine icon or a ctrl-click or a right-click, in the context menu you will have Start Menu. Choose that and your XP start menu opens.
Click to expand...

Well, that's what I'm doing but nothing happens. The start menu doesn't appear... :confused:
 
It doesn't always work. On my Mac, for instance, I have two Windows XP installations, one using Boot Camp and the other just a standard virtual machine. The difference between the two are that I have the Boot Camp instance as a member of my work's domain while my XP virtual machine is not a member of a domain.

On the Boot Camp instance, clicking on the Parallels icon pops up the Windows Start Menu when I have the task bar hidden. So that works fine. On my normal virtual machine, it doesn't. Left clicking does nothing while right clicking just brings up the normal dock Mac menu.

I tried it on a different machine where there are also two virtual machines, a standard Windows XP and a Vista installation. Left clicking for Vista on the previous RC2 would pop up the Windows Start Menu. Meanwhile the Windows XP VM wouldn't do anything if I left clicked on the Parallels icon. I couldn't compare it on RC3 because RC3 killed my Vista installation so that it wouldn't boot at all anymore. The Windows XP VM still wouldn't pop up the Start Menu under RC3.

I have not yet installed build 3186 to see if it makes a difference.
 
OK, I think I've figured out what the problem is. In case this helps others, here's what I did.

I enabled Coherence as the default display mode in my VM preferences. Now, the Start menu appears when I select it in the Dock Menu.

Contrary to what the manual says, this works even if the Windows Task Bar display is on in the View > Customize menu.

However, if the Windows Task Bar display is on, BUT is set to auto hide in the Windows preferences, then the display of all Coherence windows is "off" by the amount of pixels of the width of the sidebar... (difficult to explain, but basically, a nasty display bug...).

So, time to try out these combinations and see what fits.
 
If the dock is set to auto hide, it only seems to work if you click very carefully on th small black arrow below the icon. t's been like this since teh last release, I wish this had been fixed as it's a really nice feature.

If it's not set to autohide it seems less sensitive.
 
I tried your suggestion of setting it to start in Coherence mode as the default. My XP installation still will not show the Start Menu when clicking on the Parallels dock menu. I upgraded to 3186 and there was no difference. Because the Start Menu won't appear for any reason, I have to show the Task Bar. Sigh.

My Vista install also fails to load. Although it had been working just fine through RC1, under RC2 and RC3 killed my ability to run my Vista VM with the error that it can't run it because the BIOS is not ACPI compatible. Huh? It ran perfectly fine before. So what happened to the simulated BIOS to make it suddenly ACPI incompatible? If I try to prepare for Vista upgrade, it'll tell me the VM is not upgradeable. Another sigh. I'll have to reinstall Vista from scratch.
 
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