We’re using a nice vSphere ESXi 5.1 host for a lot of our VMs at work and today I found myself unable to get proper mouse and keyboard capture in the VMs. It just acted really strange, sometimes I could get mouse capture when I was outside the VM and as soon as I pressed any key I lost it again. I tried installing VMWare Workstation, rebooting both VMs and local computer but nothing helped. I finally tracked it down to being Synergy, the awesome tool for keyboard and mouse sharing across TCP/IP.
Apparently it was running in the background without me knowing and interupted the signals. I took me a long time to find any post relating to this issue since there are a lot of other reasons for losing capture in the VMs. Because of this I figured the hive mind of the www needed another short post about it.
Apparently it’s even been noted as an issue in Synergy.
VMWare with Synergy problems