A nice improvement here is to add Anti-Aliasing to WindowsXP SP3 for remote destkop connections (thanks to Jason L Froebe). 

Open regedit on the VM windows XP and add the following key to the register. Restart the remote session et voila!

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlTerminal ServerWinStations]

New DWORD Key: AllowFontAntiAlias

Value: 00000001

Yout tip saved me with lot of customizations to get my VMPlayer to work properly with dual monitor setup.. Now I found a great tool called Remmina (substitute to rdesktop and tsclient on Ubuntu), logged on to my windows guest and disconnected my VMplayer. Thank you..

PS: This is the 3rd time I'm trying to post this comment - captcha sucks..

I'm glad I could help ! :-)

Never had issues with the captcha's... what was the problem? 

Geert

EDIT: I updated the validation to use sliders. Happy now? 

Damn, thats nice tip - thx for shareing this

Thanks, this was helpful.  :-)

I also needed to set `pref.vmplayer.confirmOnExit = "FALSE"' in order to prevent the player from asking what you wanted to do with the virtual machine.

Although it works, on exiting I receive a

`Cannot open file "D:Virtual MachinesmachineNameace.dat": Thesystem cannot find the file specified.

VMware Player unrecoverable error: (vmplayer)

NOT_IMPLEMENTED

d:/build/ob/bora-812388/bora/apps/vmplayer/win32/playerApp.cpp:1773

A log file is available in

"C:UsersmeAppDataLocalTempvmware-nlmvanadrichemvmware-vmplayer-xxxx.log".'

Btw, I love the slider!.

Niels

Excellent find, thanks!!

Hi,

This works great, however after closing out vmplayer, when I restart vmplayer, the already running VM does not show up and I cannot access it through vmplayer. I am starting it using the same user on Ubuntu. I am able to see the running VM in the list with a state of "Powered On", but cannot access it again through vmplayer.

Any tips on what I may be doing wrong?

It's been a while, since I use libvirt/kvm now, but if I remember correctly, you need to start vmplayer with the name of the virtual machine from the commandline: 

eg: vmplayer windowsXP  (or perhaps WindowsXP.vmx)

This brings up vmplayer with the running virtual machine. 

Anyway, I used rdesktop to access my virtual Windows. 

Better to use VIX and it's vmrun command ?

The only problem I had with this is that the hosting machine has to have an X graphical session to run from.

Perhaps one could login physically on the machine, launch the graphical user interface and then launch the VM and exit/disconnect VM player. But the VM run would only be alive until the user logs off.

Correct me if I'm wrong...

I'd decided to go for totally headless KVM option after setting it up with graphical VM manager. So no need of an X session at all and the VM can run as a service. Xen could be an interesting route too - but perhaps requires more effort as the API is non graphical.