Mouse Problem in Minecraft/LWJGL when run in VMWare Player or Workstation

[mbmast]

When running Minecraft 1.6.2 inside a virtual Windows XP (32 bit) machine created by either VMWare Workstation or VMWare Player (hosted under Windows 7 x64), the virtualized USB mouse behaves very strangely.  From within the game you can view either the ground (the POV is looking straight down) or the sky (the POV is looking straight up) any mouse movement causes the POV to spin around a fixed axis.  It is impossible to alter the POV so that you are looking anywhere else (e.g. the horizon, or what's in front of you).

Within VMWare Workstation, it is possible to reconfigure the VM (by optimizing the mouse for games) to resolve this problem.  VMWare Player does not provide this ability, so the game cannot be played within a VM created by VMWare Player.

There have been posts that a solution to the VMWare Player problem is to attach two physical mice to the host and then, within VMWare Player, grab one of them and attach it to the VM.  I have tried this with no success.  VMWare Player reports that the mouse is in use by the host and cannot be (virtually) disconnected from the host.  This happens regardless of which mouse I try to attach to the VM.

I've also read that this is likely a problem within LWJGL.  Minecraft 1.6.2 uses LWJGL version 2.9.0, which is the latest version (as of my writing this).

Is this problem, or mouse problems within virtual machines generally, an acknowledged issue with LWJGL?  Are there known fixes or workarounds?

Thanks very much in advance.

[Fool Running]

Just a glaring question: Why are you even trying to do this? Minecraft works fine in Windows 7 (and XP).

P.S. It sounds like a VM problem to me. Have you tried VirtualBox?

[mbmast]

Fool Running,

No, I have not tried this in VirtualBox.  A good suggestion.

With respect to your question, I am mentoring a friend of mine's son.  He's 13, very much into Minecraft and wants to learn Java so that he can make his own modifications.  At one point, fairly early in my teaching him Java, I arrived only to discover that the development environment had been fiddled with to the point where we had to reinstall and start over.  Instead, on my own development machine, I created a virtual Windows XP machine (under VMWare Workstation) and spent considerable time installing Minecraft, Eclipse (the Java dev environment), MCP805 (a toolkit for making Minecraft modifications) and getting everything working.  Then I just powered off the VM, copied it to a flash drive and copied it onto his machine and installed VM Player (free for non-commercial use).  This provides me with a consistent development environment in which to teach him Java and walk through Minecraft modification examples without my having to worry that his every-day environment will get compromised in some way.  And should something bad happen to his machine, I can just re-copy the VM onto it from my machine.  That's why I'm doing this in a VM.

Thanks.

[Fool Running]

Well, I would still guess this is a VM issue since it works fine outside a VM. My philosophy is that if it works fine in the native environment and doesn't work in a VM, then the problem is in the VM, not the program.

Just my 2c. 

Do any games that grab the mouse work correctly in VMWare Player?

[mbmast]

I'm not a gamer at all, so I don't know if other games work fine in the VM.  To be clear, the problem is only in the VM created by VMware Player.  It also exists in the VM created by VMware Workstation, but Workstation offers a configuration setting that resolves the issue.