multiple mice do not work on WinXP in VMWare Fusion on Mac OS X 10.6.4

[sevdwal]

When I enable multiple mouse support in epoc.ini according to the advanced pointer section, the emulator starts fine.

However, when it is finished loading it does not respond to events, it cannot be dragged around the screen and it cannot be closed using it's on close menu. Task manager kills it just fine without a dialog popping up.

The emulator also looks a bit weird, as some kind of status view sits at the bottom partly obscuring the three hardware keys, as soon as the emulator starts up.

I am on a macbook with a separate mouse and keyboard, and that works fine in both mac and virtual machine, the trackpad and the mouse move the mouse pointer, clicking works etc. There are three mice drivers in winxp's device manager.

[wizard_hu_]

If you are aware of any other application using two mice at a time (some split-screen game perhaps?), you could try how it behaves.
I do not know VMWare well, but if it offers any "integration" for WinXP (like moving the mouse pointer between the host and guest OS-s without extra actions), disabling it may be a good idea. If there is a way to "connect" USB devices "directly" to the guest OS (e.g. the Mac does not see it), that may also worth a try.

[sevdwal]

There is nothing else running that might interfere.

VMWare grabs the keyboards and mouses when one of its windows become active. the VM sees these just fine as both mouses (the real one and the trackpad on the laptop) move the mouse pointer, clicking them results in mouse events being received etc.

It is not possible to connect a mouse to the VM. It works for other USB devices like card readers and phones but not for mice

[wizard_hu_]

If you start removing mice, does the amount of them change in the device manager (of XP)? If you have 2 mice, why are there 3 of them visible to the XP?

[sevdwal]

If you start removing mice, does the amount of them change in the device manager (of XP)?

No. Removing a mouse keeps does not result in a driver disappearing. On the Mac, I can see that the mouse is disconnected.

If you have 2 mice, why are there 3 of them visible to the XP?

I don't know, it isn't software I have written.

[sevdwal]

There is a partial solution: when you use bootcamp to run WinXp, multiple mice are visible. And because VMWare fusion can run bootcamp partitions in a VM, you can still use winxp in a vm most of the time (which is much better than rebooting all of the time).

You still need to edit epoc.ini to enable and disable multiple mice.

[wizard_hu_]

It is likely a defect in VMWare then.