Hide annoying VMware hint "To release input, press Ctrl+Alt"

I'm running VMWare Workstation 7 on Windows 7 x64. In the guest OS (also Windows 7 x64) I have VMWare Tools installed, but the VMWare Tools service is disabled. I run the VM in full screen mode and the VMWare toolbar at the top often displays this tooltip:

To release input, press Ctrl+Alt

This tooltip obscures a part of the VM (often the menu of a program I'm using) and it's annoying as hell. Going out of full screen mode and into it again gets rid of it, but only until I mouse over that toolbar and then it reappears! How do I get rid of it, once and for all?

I tried adding

hints.hideAll = "TRUE"

to the .vmx file for the VM and to preferences.ini and neither of those helped.

Solution 1:

I fixed this by going into Workstation Preferences and unselecting "Grab keyboard and mouse input on mouse click".

Then, restart the workstation. Obviously, VMware tools would need to be installed on the guest.

Solution 2:

This never worked for me using the vmware workstation interface, but you can do it using an HEX editor and modiyfing vmware.exe, so here's how I did it on Workstation 11.

HxD is a good one for windows.

• First, create a backup/copy of your vmware.exe file in program files.

• Close vmware workstation.

• Open HxD as an administrator and open vmware.exe.

• Once the file is open, search for the ascii string (CTRL+F) To release. It should be between the offsets 0012A350 @ 0012A390.

• Replace the following bytes by 00 (ascii null) or 2E (ascii .):

  From:
  @&!*@*@(msg.vmui.fullScreen.ungrab.tooltip)To release input, press %s
  To:
  .....................................................................

Caution! Do not delete any bytes, replace them. The file must stay the same size.