Certain graphical elements are not drawn in a virtual machine running Windows

Products

• VMware Desktop Hypervisor

Issue/Introduction

• Certain applications do not draw graphical elements correctly or at all
• Application such as Microsoft PowerPoint, Excel, Word, Visual Studio, SQL Server Management Studio, and the VMware Infrastructure Client are affected
• Empty white boxes where graphics or fonts belong
• Certain window elements not drawn
• Screen drawing acts as if the system is low on windowing resources

Environment

VMware Workstation 6.x (Linux)
VMware Workstation 6.x (Windows)

Resolution

Resolution

Upgrade to Workstation 6.0.1 or higher, or manually force the video memory assigned to the virtual machine to be evenly divisible by 64KB.

Background

Workstation 6.0.0 introduces a new video features such as 3D acceleration support. This requires the video memory setting to be setup differently than in previous versions of Workstation. When a new virtual machine is created, Workstation automatically sets the video memory to a percentage amount of the host computer's memory installed. In some cases this causes the amount of memory assigned to the virtual video adapter to be an amount that is not evenly divisible by 64KB (65536 bytes). In many cases this is not an issue, however the Microsoft DirectDraw API specification for Windows requires that the amount of video memory on the video adapter be an even multiple of 64 KB. When the amount does not fall on a 64KB boundary, certain drawing calls to the DirectDraw API fail and no graphics are drawn in its place.

Workstation 6.0.1 fixes this issue by forcing the value to be an even multiple of 64 KB.

Additional Information

• VMware Workstation 6.0 Release Notes
• Applications running in a Windows guest experience screen drawing issues (1261)