VirtualBox

Opened 7 years ago

Last modified 16 months ago

#16296 new defect

Left half portion of the guest's widescreen desktop becomes unresponsive to left mouse button clicks

Reported by: Tony DeFusco Owned by:
Component: other Version: VirtualBox 5.1.10
Keywords: left mouse button click unresponsive half screen Cc:
Guest type: Linux Host type: Windows

Description

I am not sure what causes this or how to manually reproduce this behavior; otherwise, I would have reported this issue a long time ago. Almost every day (and after no particular amount of up-time), the left half of my Linux desktop becomes unresponsive to left mouse button clicks. Left-mouse button clicks do continue to work on the right half portion of the screen. Actually, it is not the entire left-half portion of the screen that is affected; more like approximately the left two/fifths (left 40%) portion of the entire screen.

This problem is very annoying because smaller windows running in the affected portion of the screen cannot be interacted with or dragged over to the responsive side of the screen.

When this problem occurs, nothing I have tried so far (e.g. restarting the window manager) will correct it. I am forced to close out (as best as I can) all the running applications in the Linux guest and then reboot the guest OS.

I have no idea what is causing this. A faulty screensaver timeout process? Your guess is as good as mine.

Some specific details of my setup:

  • Guest OS: 3.16.0-4-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 3.16.36-1+deb8u2 (2016-10-19) x86_64 GNU/Linux
  • Guest window manager: Openbox 3.5.2
  • Host OS: Windows 7 Enterprise 64-bit
  • Host configuration: dual identical DELL P2414H widescreen monitors (1920x1080 resolution); VirtualBox is running as a maximized window on my right-side monitor

I believe that this strange behavior has been happening as far back as version 5.0.20 of Virtual Box.

Attachments (1)

CrunchBang++ Linux WS-2016-12-16-09-53-28.log (88.9 KB ) - added by Tony DeFusco 7 years ago.

Download all attachments as: .zip

Change History (11)

comment:1 by Michael Thayer, 7 years ago

Possible duplicate of #14743? If not, please attach a log file as described in the new ticket guidelines<1>.

  1. https://www.virtualbox.org/newticket

comment:2 by Tony DeFusco, 7 years ago

Hello.

Thank you for pointing out to me about issue #14743. There are some striking similarities and insight revealed in that issue's commentary. However, nobody commenting on issue #14743 has mentioned anything about mouse clicks still working on the right half portion of the guest's screen; the issue I am reporting may be related to the other one, but it is slightly different.

I am attaching the vbox log file as instructed. Please note that as I attach this log file, I am *not* currently experiencing the issue that I have reported. If you think that I should attach the log file again when the problem returns, I will make a point of doing that as well.

comment:3 by Michael Thayer, 7 years ago

The log file is mainly to give us general information about your set-up; I suspect that it will not provide much special information at the time the problem occurs. If it happens again, try terminating the VBoxClient drag and drop processes in the guest as described in ticket #14743. If that fixes it I think we can assume this is a duplicate.

comment:4 by Tony DeFusco, 7 years ago

Thank you Michael.

It appears that these two reported issues indeed are closely related.

I was able to manually force my reported issue by holding down the left mouse button while selecting text in the geany text editor and moving the mouse pointer to the host monitor (on the left) while still holding down the left mouse button.

I searched for the offending process:

$ ps aux | grep "VBoxClient --draganddrop" | grep "Sl"

and killed it; the mouse pointer left-clicking functionality immediately returned:

$ kill -15 <the pid number>

or in one command:

$ kill -15 $(ps aux | grep "VBoxClient --draganddrop" | grep "Sl" | awk '{print $2;}')

I then manually restarted the process:

$ /usr/bin/VBoxClient --draganddrop

After forcing the issue, killing and restarting the process, I am no longer able to force the issue again. I wonder if the instigator of this problem needs to reach critical mass before the problem can reappear.

I am guessing that the reason I have mouse button functionality on just over half the screen (the right hand side) is because I have a wide-screen monitor. Perhaps some calculation that relies on the screen dimensions is failing somewhere in the code; this clue could be the "the smoking gun".

In summary, I have confirmed that there is a defect with multi-monitor support that occurs with holding down the mouse button in the guest and dragging the mouse pointer from guest monitor to host monitor. Has this defect been found and fixed already? If not, is it currently being investigated?

By the way... I don't know if this is related, but sometimes clipboard functionality from guest to host fails. I copy data to the guest's clipboard in guest, but attempting to pasting that data the host fails; the host clipboard's contents did not get replaced with the contents of the guest's clipboard. I have to do the following to get it working again:

/usr/bin/VBoxClient --clipboard

--Tony

Last edited 7 years ago by Tony DeFusco (previous) (diff)

comment:5 by Jörg Skottke, 3 years ago

CC me/reminder: This happens to on "older" VMs which have been in regular use for longer periods of time and hve seen a couple of system/vboxguest updates.

comment:6 by michaelk2407, 2 years ago

Same problem here. The workaround works great, this will save me a lot of time. Thank you!

comment:7 by rje, 21 months ago

I have this same issue in 6.1.30. Thank you for the workaround! Why isn't this bug assigned to anyone though? It's been here for 6 years! (I'm using a brand new VM, definitely not an "older" one, and I wasn't using drag and drop at all.)

Last edited 21 months ago by rje (previous) (diff)

comment:8 by Ha1e, 20 months ago

I created an account specifically for this comment.

The problem is still there, and it is wildly taking out the brain.

I have to reboot the virtual machine and run all working programs again.

The problem started with debian 9, which version of the virtualbox was I don't remember anymore. But it is also present on debian 11.

Maybe this is an X server problem, but it still really pisses me off.

OS: Debian 11, Linux debian 5.10.0-15-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 5.10.120-1 (2022-06-09) x86_64 GNU/Linux VirtualBox: 6.1.16 r140961

Last edited 20 months ago by Ha1e (previous) (diff)

comment:9 by NothingsPerfect, 19 months ago

(I too created an account host for this comment!) Same problem here. Top 30% and left 30% of the screen stops responding to mouse clicks daily. Remainder of the screen works fine. Killing "VBoxClient --draganddrop" solves the problem immediately. The VM runs on my second screen in windowed auto-resize mode.

I think it always happens after a focus switch to outside the VM; i.e. i do something on the host, then move the mouse back into the VM (which stays open on my second monitor), and there it isnt working anymore.

Host OS: Windows 10 21H2 Host Hardware: Lenovo ThinkPad T14 Gen 2i VirtualBox Version: 6.1.36 r152435 (Qt5.6.2) Guest OS: Linux kali 5.18.0-kali5-amd64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Debian 5.18.5-1kali6 (2022-07-07) x86_64 GNU/Linux

Version 0, edited 19 months ago by NothingsPerfect (next)

comment:10 by Nexus2112, 16 months ago

(I too created an account just for this comment!) Same problem here.

I created a post on the forums with my Setup and the way I can systematically reproduce this issue thanks to ToneDeF's last comment.

Please solve this issue in VBoxClient --draganddrop. It is old. It is annoying. And it is now reproducible.

Forum post: https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=107966&p=528608#p528608

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