VBox 5.10/WinXP guest/nonfunctioning mouse buttons

[tsakerjr]

Recently upgraded from Vbox 4.3.32 to 5.0.10 on two Ubuntu 14.04 hosts running WinXP as guests. One, a desktop, has a wireless USB mouse. The other, a laptop, uses a touchpad. No problems with 4.3.32. After upgrade, mouse pointers work on both systems, but the mouse buttons do not. Have checked all settings and all are as they should be. No such problem with Win7 guest OSs.

[mpack]

Make sure the VM isn't defining USB filters that can result in it grabbing ownership of host devices such as keyboard and mouse.

[tsakerjr]

There are no defined filters on either the XP or 7 guests. Mouse buttons work fine in the host OS and Win7 guests on both machines.

[loukingjr]

Is the Pointing Device in the settings for the guest set to USB Tablet? I checked both my Ubuntu 15.10 and Linux Mint 17.2 (Ubuntu 14.04) hosts and the trackpad works fine with XP.

[michael]

I'm afraid I don't currently have time to investigate this, but if you want some pointers to take a look yourself, here are a couple:

https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/MouseInput
http://serverfault.com/questions/7670/w ... ent-viewer

The second is for keyboard, but perhaps the xspy++ tool (seems to be part of Visual Studio 2015) would also work for mouse input. If it does seem useful feel free to write up a short guide we can add to our wiki page.

[tsakerjr]

I checked the device manager and found the USB tablet was enabled. I disabled it and rebooted. They still don't work. I'm going to try the other solutions.

[loukingjr]

Maybe I wasn't clear, you want the Pointing Device for the guest set to USB Tablet.

As far as the wireless mouse, the only buttons that would normally work in a guest are left-click and right-click.

[tsakerjr]

It was enabled but not set for that. Will try that.

[michaln]

Maybe providing a VBox.log from the affected VM would help?

[tsakerjr]

OK, I fixed the problem with the desktop. I re-enabled the tablet device. I discovered that there were two pointing devices listed in the Mouse menu of the control panel and deleted one. I also uninstalled the specialized mouse software I used in the guest XP OS and now the mouse buttons work. It must have been a device conflict that the VBox 5.0.10 won't resolve.

It may be more difficult to fix the problem on the laptop, but I'll try that later.

[tsakerjr]

OK, everything appears to be fixed. Uninstalling the pointing device and allowing XP to reinstall on start-up appears to have reestablished full communication between the device and the OS on both the desktop and laptop XP guest OSs. Wish I could ditch XP entirely, but I have a lot of older code I need to run and there are too many horror stories about trying to run old code on newer OSs. Inertia is a dish best kept warm.

I'm very, very grateful for everyone's suggestions. Great users here.

[michaln]

OK, this is really interesting. So you had VMs that worked with 4.3.32, and when the exact same VMs were run under 5.0.10 (with identical configuration), mouse buttons didn't work in the guest? Could you please expand more on the software in the guest that was causing trouble?

[tsakerjr]

Both GMs are WinXP. Both had Synaptic pointing devices installed. No changes to the settings were made manually in the upgrade from 4.3.32 to 5.0.10. Removing the devices, uninstalling the drivers and rebooting the GMs freed up the buttons.

[michaln]

OK, now I have some idea what might be going wrong. Could you please either provide a VM which exhibits the problem or tell me how to make one?

[tsakerjr]

I wish I could give you a VM, but both are fixed, so I couldn't give you one that's broken. What I would do is create a WinXP vdi under VB 4.X and perform a manual upgrade to VB 5.X by uninstalling VB 4.X. Hope this helps.