Mouse wheel in VirtualPC (mostly) does not work on 64-bit Windows 7 RC
- by JonStonecash
I have recently upgraded my laptop from WinXP Pro (32-bit) to Windows 7 RC (64-bit). I have a number of VirtualPC 2007 images that I use for testing on various platforms and looking at beta software. I have installed the 64-bit version of VirtualPC. The images all work with the exception of the mouse wheel within the virtual machine. I have tried this out with WinXP Pro, Windows 7 RC, and Windows Server 2008 images. All are 32-bit and all exhibit the same behavior: a gentle rotation of the wheel does nothing; a quick rotation of the wheel sometimes gets a scroll and sometimes not. I regard this behavior as unusable as I tend to use the mouse wheel a lot. All of this worked just fine on WinXP. I have re-installed the Virtual machine additions on all of the machines. The Windows 7 RC virtual image was created after the upgrade to Windows 7 and the 64-bit version of VirtualPC (just to isolate the possibility that I had corrupted the images during the transition).
I have googled, binged, and yahoo-ed. There are scattered mentions of this problem (dating back to VPC 2004) but no solutions.
I am aware that I could start up one of these images and then use remote desktop connections to get access to that image. I, in fact, do just that for some development that I am doing; the mouse works just fine. This is acceptable in this case because I spend hours at a time in the development VM. These test environments are different in that I will bring up an image for just a short time: minutes rather than hours. Adding the rdc step is much more significant in these cases.
Does anyone have any idea of what to do next?
