VMware mouse occasionally held down (cannot “unclick”, left mouse stops working, grab ungrab)

Question

I have Debian 6.0.6 on vmware player. I notice once in a while the mouse just selects everything - like starting from some point to wherever my mouse is currently at. I can't unselect or press any buttons, except right click. And then I still can't select anything, but if I right click the context menu goes away. I know this is really localized, but if someone has seen this issue and can point out where it's from I can make the title more general. After a while the selection goes away and I can click again. I can send signals via VMware but it doesn't seem to help (just got to wait). Any idea what's causing this?

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Finally, I noticed that the this was applying to any click when my mouse was held down over the scrollbar and I couldn't click anything else.

Answer 1

I found this thread:http://superuser.com/questions/155855/mouse-button-gets-stuck-down-in-vmware-guest-os

Though I couldn't find these settings in vmplayer, some more digging and I fixed it by changing VMware's settings in C:\Users\me\AppData\Roaming\VMware\preferences.ini

by adding

pref.motionGrab = "FALSE"
pref.motionUngrab = "FALSE"

Basically, there's a problem with the mouse auto-ungrabbing when the mouse leaves the VM. This makes it so you can't take the mouse away unless you hit the ungrab key combination (ctrl + alt on windows by default). Seems to be working so far.

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While it was a useful change, and seemed to work, got the error again after a day.

This is my latest solution, from Debian Squeeze: Left mouse click stops working

Right click works, so right click on Terminal shortcut. Hover mouse over "open", and hit enter (keyboard works). Type:

modprobe -r psmouse
modprobe psmouse

And that seems to restore the mouse. Don't know what is causing it. There's mention of Xorg... I have it installed... don't know what to do though to make sure it's working. This is my temporary solution, but if anyone knows anything better please let me know.