DOS Additions. Remote Desktop and Mouse

I appear to have a common problem with mouse control when used remotely via
RDP. In my setup I have an XP host running VPC 2004 SP1 with a VM running
MSDOS 6.2. I have installed the DOS additions that were packaged with VPC
2004 SP1 and they appear to be working i.e. folder sharing and idle detection
are Ok. However, when connected to the XP host via RDP, the mouse does not
respond properly. Sometimes it does move but in the wrong direction - it is
basically unusable. I have also noticed that no matter what I do, the Pointer
Integration option on the settings dialog for the VM remains grayed out. This
suggests that although the additions are installed there is some other
problem... or it just does not work under MSDOS.

 

For future reference for anybody else with this issue, I had some feedback
from "Virtual PC Guy's WebLog" (http://blogs.msdn.com/Virtual_PC_Guy):

"We do not support pointer integration under DOS. Unfortunately DOS did not
have a universal pointer routine - and each program was responsible for
implementing the details of mouse pointer support. This means that it is not
possible for us to provide a generic pointer integration solution for DOS.

Without mouse pointer integration you will see exactly the sort of behavior
you have described over RDP.

Unfortunately I do not know of anything that you can do about this. If you
are using the virtual machine remotely most of the time - you might want to
consider using Virtual Server - as it would allow you to connect remotely to
the virtual machine (not through RDP) and use a non-integrated mouse."

I have found another solution - NetOp (a remote desktop utility from
Danware) still supports a DOS based host. I have been able to install this
within my DOS VM, setup networking so that NetBIOS is enabled over TCP/IP
back to the host PC NIC and then use the NetOp guest to attach directly to
the DOS environment in the VM. Mouse control is now actually possible.