With Microsoft’s recent release of Windows Search 4.0 for Windows XP, a number of users who had it installed complained about their system becoming rather slow and they wanted the old search functionality returned. In most cases, a simple uninstall via Add/Remove Programs restored the search functionality to its previous incarnation, but in one particular stubborn case, “Windows Search 4.0” did not show up in Add/Remove programs while Windows Search 4.0 was clearly installed (toolbar and the taskbar icon were present, as were the individual processes). Unfortunately, C:\Windows\$NtUninstallKB940157$ was not present, either, so a manual uninstall could not be performed.
The solution was to forcefully remove the following registry entries, via regedit:
- HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Updates\Windows XP\SP3\KB940157
- HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\KB940157
Once those were removed, manually installing Windows Search 4.0 from Microsoft got the add-on to install properly, complete with an entry in Add/Remove Programs. Finally, selecting “Remove” from the Add/Remove Programs control panel for “Windows Search 4.0” did the deed and removed it from the system.
In this post, I outlined the needed changes in order to get VMWare Workstation to behave properly with the keyboard under Gnome. I recently came across an easier solution: Simply place the following line in the .vmware/config file:
xkeymap.nokeycodeMap = true
This didn’t happen for me with previous versions of Fedora or previous version of VMWare Workstation, but it seems to have happened to others at varying times. This problem came about for me when I upgraded to Fedora 10 (I had already been using VMWare Workstation 6.5 with no issues).
I have Windows XP running in a VM to deal with the “windows-only” aspects of my daily job, and after the Fedora 10 upgrade, a handful of keys no longer worked properly. These problem keys were:
- insert
- home
- page up
- delete
- end
- page down
- all of the arrow keys (left, right, up, down) – It should be noted that the left arrow was acting like the “alt” key and the down arrow was acting like the “windows” key.
The solution, as found on this page, is easily summarized like this:
- Create (if it does not yet exist) ~/.vmware/config
- In that file, enter the following:
xkeymap.keycode.108 = 0x138 # Alt_R
xkeymap.keycode.106 = 0x135 # KP_Divide
xkeymap.keycode.104 = 0x11c # KP_Enter
xkeymap.keycode.111 = 0x148 # Up
xkeymap.keycode.116 = 0x150 # Down
xkeymap.keycode.113 = 0x14b # Left
xkeymap.keycode.114 = 0x14d # Right
xkeymap.keycode.105 = 0x11d # Control_R
xkeymap.keycode.118 = 0x152 # Insert
xkeymap.keycode.119 = 0x153 # Delete
xkeymap.keycode.110 = 0x147 # Home
xkeymap.keycode.115 = 0x14f # End
xkeymap.keycode.112 = 0x149 # Prior
xkeymap.keycode.117 = 0x151 # Next
xkeymap.keycode.78 = 0x46 # Scroll_Lock
xkeymap.keycode.127 = 0x100 # Pause
xkeymap.keycode.133 = 0x15b # Meta_L
xkeymap.keycode.134 = 0x15c # Meta_R
xkeymap.keycode.135 = 0x15d # Menu
Save the file and start VMWare Workstation to get the full functionality of the keyboard back.