Jerky mouse movement on host (VirtualBox not running)?

rt · Post by rt » 4. Dec 2008, 12:53

Hi,

I have a Vista 64-bit host; I have recently installed VirtualBox (2.0.6) on it. It runs my Linux guests fine and dandy (I can even use my scanner that it not supported under Vista), the only problem is that something is broken with my mouse now (of course, I mean the behaviour of the pointer/ cursor, not the physical device itself). To be more specific, the cursor movement seems to be erratic and jerky. Sometimes it seems to be ignoring my hand movement for a fraction of second (the cursor just stays where it is, extremely irritating), sometimes it looks like it's trying to "make up" for the lost movement and moves the pointer in one big jump, sometimes it's moving the pointer in the right direction and then visibly pulls it back where it was (!).

I've tried three different mouse devices (with and without reboots between changes), to the same result (it seems to be working all right for a few minutes, and then it shows again).

The funny thing is that it does not matter whether VirtualBox is running or not. I can boot the PC, work for a few minutes (without touching VirtualBox) and will still be affected by it.

I have a feeling it has something to do with VirtualBox USB drivers *or* it's mouse support. I may be wrong of course, but well, the correlation is all too obvious...

For the record, I disabled MS SMS mouse driver in Device Manager -- no change.

Thoughts?

Post by **mpack** » 4. Dec 2008, 14:10

As far as I know, there is no VBox mouse driver running on the host, so I suspect your problem is not caused by VBox.

rt · Post by rt » 4. Dec 2008, 14:24

I am pretty sure VBox affects the mouse somehow:
http://www.google.com/search?q=virtualbox+sms+mouse

Post by **Sasquatch** » 4. Dec 2008, 21:11

Have you tried to remove VB and see how your mouse acts then? Any VM you created will be kept. If the mouse is still jerky, it's not VB, but your Vista system.

Post by **mpack** » 5. Dec 2008, 14:03

rt wrote:I am pretty sure VBox affects the mouse somehow:
http://www.google.com/search?q=virtualbox+sms+mouse

I didn't search every hit on that google page, but the ones I looked at seemed to be discussing problems inside the guest, while VBox was running. Not what you described.

Every Windows app has full mouse info, so there's no need for VBox (as an app running on the Windows host) to do anything unusual to access the mouse, hence I wouldn't expect unusual side effects.

rt · Post by rt » 5. Dec 2008, 18:45

mpack wrote:
rt wrote:I am pretty sure VBox affects the mouse somehow:
http://www.google.com/search?q=virtualbox+sms+mouse
I didn't search every hit on that google page, but the ones I looked at seemed to be discussing problems inside the guest, while VBox was running. Not what you described.

Sorry for being imprecise. I meant specifically:
http://www.kleinfelter.com/vbox-vs-sms
Now that you say that, I think you are right; I must have misread this and similar posts.

mpack wrote:Every Windows app has full mouse info, so there's no need for VBox (as an app running on the Windows host) to do anything unusual to access the mouse, hence I wouldn't expect unusual side effects.

Sounds reasonable. Yet I still have to find out what's causing these problems.