virtualbox.org

I am running a 32bit OpenSuSE11.1 guest in Windows XP Professional on a Dell Inspirion D620 laptop. When using the guest to write documents (e.g. e-mail in Firefox or OpenOffice documents) random, spurious mouse clicks occur while I am typing. When this happens I suddenly find myself typing in the wrong part of the document because the mouse button has been clicked (not by me!), repositioning the cursor wherever the mouse pointer happens to be. I have disabled tapping in the touchpad settings in Windows. I tried disabling gestures (e.g. scrolling via the touchpad) but this did not prevent the spurious mouse clicks while typing. I have experienced the problem with VirtualBox versions 2.2.4, 3.0.4 and 3.0.6, with the corresponding guest additions installed in each case. The problem also occurs when using the Windows Remote Desktop Connection tool to connect to the guest via RDP.

The problem only occurs when I am using the Alps touchpad. If I disable the touchpad and use a USB mouse instead the problem does not occur. The laptop is a dual boot machine with OpenSuSE10.3 installed as the other OS. If I run the same guest VM with OpenSuSE10.3 as the host OS the problem does not occur. I presume this means there is a problem with the way VirtualBox talks to the Windows XP Alps touchpad driver. Any suggestions would be most welcome.

-Dan Bretherton

Touchpad drivers can be b*tchy with VBox, look for a newer version or maybe even an older version.

Thanks for the drivers suggestion. Unfortunately changing the driver didn't work but I have now found a solution to the problem - I disabled the pointing stick (i.e. the rubber blob in middle of the keyboard). In desperation I disabled the touch pad and tried to learn how to use the pointing stick instead, and while playing with its settings discovered that it has a tapping facility just like the touch pad. There is even an option to disable tapping during typing, which made me wonder if that had been the cause of my spurious mouse clicks all along. Disabling the pointing stick altogether cured the problem, but it may be possible to achieve the same result by disabling pointing stick tapping or selecting the "disable tap while typing" option although I haven't had time to try these.
-Dan.