RedHat 5 guest VM mouse clicks stop working

[umk]

I had high hopes for Virtualbox but unless I can get reliable mouse control, I'll have to go with VMWare.

My linux VM boots fine and I can login to my O/S account. Mouse works no problem. I then begin launching apps and switching between windows and before long, my mouse clicks are ignored. The pointer is still there and moves just fine, but clicking (left or right buttons) doesn't do anything. I can move the pointer out of the guest VM to the host and mouse clicks are fine. But moving the pointer back to the guest, mouse clicks are ignored. After much frustration, I finally figured out that when the clicks stop working, if I press ALT-tab, mouse clicks begin working again. But after a while they stop and I'm back to pressing ALT-tab.

I'm running Windows 7 64 bit host with a RedHat 5.9 64bit guest. Mouse is USB. Guest additions are also installed.

What's going on?

[umk]

RedHat guest VM

[Michael Thayer]

I quickly put together a wiki page about investigating problems with mouse support in VirtualBox<1>. Please take a look at that to see if you can find out more about what is happening here.

<1> https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/MouseInput

[blf2vkr]

There should be a resolution for the problem, which is not there. Please provide step by step resolution to resolve this issue.

[Michael Thayer]

That is rather hard without knowing exactly what the problem is (we failed to reproduce it here, and so far it is known to affect two of the many people who use Redhat EL 5.9). Please have a look at the link I posted above about how to get more information. The output of evtest in the guest would be interesting, though it is not the easiest tool to use of course (you will need to work out the right device to use it with). I personally suspect some problem with the way the guest is set up, or some application in the guest which is interfering with the mouse, and I suspect this problem could probably occur on a physical machine too. As I said though, without more information it is hard to say for sure.

[aeichner]

Please reopen if still relevant with a recent VirtualBox release.