Re: Guest window looses input focus in unity mode when activating dashboard?

Hello Changhai,

Wonderful to hear you are looking into this.  Focus issues are extremely pervasive for me in my VMWare Fusion experience, happening so often it's difficult to give you any special reproduction steps that wouldn't be too specific and therefore misleading!  But I will try to give the best explanation I can.

First, my machine:

27" iMac

Processor  3.4 GHz Intel Core i7

Memory  12 GB 1333 MHz DDR3

Graphics  AMD Radeon HD 6970M 1024 MB

Software  OS X 10.8.4 (12E55)

VMWare Fusion Professional Version 5.0.3 (1040386)

Guest OS:

Windows 7 Professional, SP1, 32 bit

I normally use unity mode, and that's where I notice the focus problems.  I've tried doing many of the things in the other modes, and haven't seen any focus problems.

I notice the focus problems in many many applications, including the task bar, so let's start there.

Repro steps:

1. The guest OS is just started up and logged in as a user, with no user applications running, no windows open.
2. Click the Start button, and select "Control Panel".  The control panel window appears.
3. Click the Start button again.  EXPECTED: Start menu appears.  ACTUAL BEHAVIOR: Task bar gets focus, but start menu does not appear.  The start button must be clicked a second time before the start menu appears.

In many (but not all) programs, windows suddenly lose focus while using drop-down menus.  In some programs, this causes the menu itself to disappear, in other cases the menu stays visible even with the focus absent from the parent window. Firefox, Quicken and GIMP all exhibit this:

1. Open GIMP 2.8 or Quicken 2012 in the guest OS
2. Click on a menu, and start moving the mouse around on the menus, hovering over menu items and sub-menus, but not clicking on any menu item.
3. EXPECTED: Menus stay visible and window retains focus ("active" coloration in window border).  ACTUAL BEHAVIOR: After just a few seconds, if no menu item is selected, the menu disappears and the window border changes to "inactive" or "non-focus" coloration.

1. Open Firefox
2. Click on a menu and move the mouse around, activating sub-menus and hovering over menu items and sub-menus, but not clicking on any menu item.
3. EXPECTED: Window remains active (indicated by border coloration).  ACTUAL BEHAVIOR: Window becomes inactive, although the menu continues to be visible and responsive to user input.

In Outlook 2010 for Windows (which I use for my primary email client), I have noticed all kinds of issues when having multiple message windows open at once.  I haven't nailed down all the exact circumstances that surround some of the issues, but one of the most reliable ones to reproduce is:

1. Open Outlook.
2. Open a message that is in your inbox.
3. Click the "Reply" icon on the ribbon of the message window.
4. EXPECTED: The new "Reply" compose window appears on top of the original message window with input focus, and the original message window is in the background.  ACTUAL BEHAVIOR: The new "Reply" compose window appears briefly (a fraction of a second) on top of the original message window, but is quickly relegated to the background and deactivated, while the original reply window is elevated to the foreground, and activated. NOTE - This does not happen every time, but at least half the time.  If I continue to click the "Reply" icon on the ribbon in the original message window, I will get some compose windows that appear correctly on top of the original message window, but most of them will get put back underneath the original message window, and I have to fish it back out to actually compose my reply.

Hopefully those are enough to get started.  I don't know if these all have one root cause, or if each is completely independent. In the latter case, I'm sure you will want to hear all of my special focus issue repro steps... so if you need more examples, let me know.

Thank you!

Dan