virtualbox.org

First of all, this problem *only* occurs on the login screen of the Windows client.
If I succeed logging into the client, the keyboard works fine.

The scenario:

I just updated the host from Ubuntu 14.04 to 16.04.
On 14.04 I never saw this problem.
Maybe I should mention, that I upgraded Virtualbox also from 4.3.x to 5.1.4.

I have some headless Windows guests (Win 7, Win 10) - all of them have the same problem.

When I now try to connect from a Linux machine:

rdesktop -a 24 -g 1600x950 -z -N -xl -u klaus -d gbr 192.168.1.30

I see the welcome (login) screen and I'm able to use the mouse, but I cannot type in a password.

I can workaround this using the -p option:

rdesktop -a 24 -g 1600x950 -z -N -xl -u klaus -d gbr -p - 192.168.1.30

but thus is nasty, as you cannot put such stuff into a menu item (putting the password in plain text would help, but us at least as nasty).

Strange to say, that this phenomenon does *not* occur, when I omit all those user related options (-u, -d, -p). When using this commandline:

rdesktop -a 24 -g 1600x950 -z -N -xl 192.168.1.30

everything is fine. I see the login screen and can type in my credentials.
Unfortunately I have to type in all the stuff now (user, domain, password) each time ... that's annoying, but it works .... as long as noone uses one of the -u, -d, -p options.
If anyone tries to connect using one of these options, the keyboard is dead at the login screen for all subsequent connects.
I need to poweroff/startup the guest machine to get this working again.

Anyone any ideas?

These kinds of problems that are reproducible should be reported to bugtracker.
It would also help if you can post the ticket number here so other can see the progress, add information, or see the final results.