Video driver problem for Windows XP VMs

[trunolimit]

When I use vSphere client to view and work in my XP virtual machine, the video goes crazy.This just started happening, I've used XP VMs successfully for months. Here is a picture of the problem. It starts off as a color pixelation on any open window, then it spreads to the whole screen. VMtools are installed.

[narenotpp]

instead of using VM Console from vSphere client, try enabling RDP and use it with RDP client, see if it troubles you then.

[trunolimit]

Great idea. However, my use case for this VM makes it isolated on the network. I'd have to do some serious network-fu to make RDP a solution. Which in all honesty would make the VM useless because if I can reach that VLAN externally I'd just use my laptop to do the work I need to do.

I guess an explanation on how I'm using this VM is in order. I have Cisco's VIRL running on my esxi server. VIRL uses about 4 virtual NICs for network simulations. I need a windows based computer to be able to communicate to those NICs. Each NIC is on it's own VLAN on Vswitch0. XP is very lightweight and still runs most of the programs I need which makes it the perfect VM for this environment. I can just drop the VM into the VLAN i need it to be on and do everything I need with out having to make any changes on the external network. Now in order for RDP to work I would need to make that VLAN reachable externally which is what I was trying to avoid.

[trunolimit]

I figured it out. I had the wrong vmtools installed. I had VMware-tools-windows-9.10.0-2476743 installed. I installed VMware-tools-windows-9.4.10-2068191 instead and I haven't had the problem.