Can I resize the title bar in a full-screen VM?

[CpDeveloper]

The drop-down title bar in VMware Workstation 8 is much wider than in version 7 even though most of it is empty space on a 1280x1024 screen.  More importantly, it interferes with the dropdown menu for LogMeIn that I use frequently.  Is there any way to narrow the title bar so that I can position it beside rather than on top of the LogMeIn title bar?

Dan

[CpDeveloper]

Also, the next and previous VM buttons on the title bar now cycle through all VMs even if they are suspended or powered off.  That's quite annoying when I have 10-12 VMs that are suspended and only 2-3 that are running.

And please direct me to the proper place if this is not it, but I am now having all kinds of functional problems with VMWare Workstation 8 that I did not have with version 7 (Win7-64 host with Win7-32 VMs):

• First, I appear to have lost hardware graphics acceleration in my VMs.  The video performance is dreadful.  Hardware acceleration is still enabled in the display settings for all my VMs but something as basic as dragging a browser window across the VM desktop flickers horribly.
• Second, the VM window does not always update if it is not focused.  I often leave a VM maximized on one monitor while working in apps on the base machine on a separate monitor.  An an example, the clock in the system tray of the VM did not update until I returned focus to the VM at which point it jumped ahead 15 minutes indicating that at least that portion of the screen had not been redrawn for 15 minutes.
• Third, the overall performance of my VMs is way down.  I do lots of development in Visual Studio on my VMs and the time to load and compile solutions has gone up significantly after I upgraded from version 7.

Please tell me that there are either fixes in the works for these problems or that I can downgrade to version 7.  And I did upgrade VMWare Tools on the VMs in question.

[0WayneH0]

Title bar re-sizing; I had the same question / reasons as you. This is the only way to customize size at the current time. It would also be nice to customize position, but this is better than nothing:

In your preferences.ini file add a line:

pref.commandBar.fullScreen.width = "x"

where "x" is say "50" (defaults to "70" I think).

Preferences.ini can be found at:

c:\users\<user name>\AppData\Roaming\VMware\

for a Vista/Win7 host.

Now, re your other 3 issues:

1. First, I appear to have lost hardware graphics acceleration in my VMs.

     Known bug. See this thread: http://communities.vmware.com/message/1840185#1840185

2. Second, the VM window does not always update if it is not focused.

     Yes, I have noticed this myself. I have been tricked into thinking that I had a couple of hours up my sleeve when really I didn't. It may be worthy of its own thread since it seems to be a bug new to WS8. I haven't seen this mentioned in any other thread until now.

3. Third, the overall performance of my VMs is way down.

     This may also relate to the thread at #1. I also heavily use Visual Studio and it's fine for me with work-arounds in that thread above. If anything, maybe faster than WS7 overall.

Finally, you can definitely go back to WS7 if you want (just downgrade your VM hardware compatibility to 6.5,7.x), but this performance issue is fixed in the next dot release (confirmed by VMware).

Take it easy.

[CpDeveloper]

Very helpful, thanks!