virtualbox.org

Overall, seamless mode seems to work perfectly. However, I'm having a few problems keeping track of things while in seamless mode and I was wondering if anyone had any tips.

Assume I have 2 VM running in seamless mode (IE: Corporate primary VM, Demo VM, a locked down VM used for mergers, etc). Having multiple start menus stacking up on my screen gets very distracting and if something like 'notepad' happens to be open on all 3 instances (1 physical + 2 VMs), it's hard to track which notepad goes with which instance.

Is it possible to do something like colorize the VM'ed taskbar and then put that same color as a boarder around the seamless instance of notepad? That would provide some type of visual queue.

Something like that is already available. It's called themes. Set a different theme or colour scheme per instance. E.g. set on your Host the XP Luna Blue theme, on the dev machine the Silver theme and on the locked down one the Olive theme. Then you have the classic look for another machine if you happen to run 3 VMs. Taskbars can be changed too for appearance. Not only does the theme provide an identification for it, but why not move the taskbar to different corners of the screen? Host at the bottom, dev on the right, locked down on the left and the last one at the top.