Is your mouse & keyboard behaving erratically in Hyper-V?

I use Hyper-V a lot. Lately it seems like I spent more time working with virtual machines in Hyper-V than working on my physical desktop computers. I love the convenience of managing virtual machines with Hyper-V Manager. One problem that I ran into recently had to do with the mouse cursor. Although I have been using this Windows Server 2008 computer running Hyper-V for weeks, while working in a virtual machine that runs my SharePoint server I noticed today that my mouse cursor turned into a dot, instead of the normal arrow. I tried to change the cursor, rebooted the machine and tried several things but to no avail. I normally use Remote Desktop Connection to connect to the server running Hyper-V and then open the virtual machine from inside the Hyper-V Manager.

I ran into a TechNet document that explained that when you use Hyper-V Manager to connect to a virtual machine, the connection to the virtual machine is provided by Virtual Machine Connection. However, Microsoft doesn’t support the Virtual Machine Connection within a Remote Desktop Connection (RDC) session. Therefore, you may experience a lack of mouse functionality and erratic keyboard behavior.

A simple solution is to avoid using Virtual Machine Connection within a Remote Desktop Connection session. In other words, do one of the following:

1. Instead of using RDC to connect to the server running Hyper-V that is hosting the virtual machine, connect to the virtual machine directly using RDC.

2. Instead of using RDC to connect to the server running Hyper-V, login to the physical console of server running Hyper-V (RDC console session is not good enough). You can then use Virtual Machine Connection to connect to the virtual machine.

3. A third option is to install Virtual Machine Connection on a Windows Server 2008 or Windows Vista SP1 computer and then connect to the virtual machine using a Virtual Machine Connection session.