Why does Visual Studio 2010 have rendering problems in VMware?

Question

We were testing our WPF application on Windows XP in the VMware Player (with VMware Tools) and noticed that dropdowns were buggy in that all the choices would appear when you clicked on the ComboBox but as you moused over them they would disappear.

We then noticed that Visual Studio Express 2010 has the exact same problem with its menus.

Here a menu item is hanging by itself in the middle of the screen:

Here a menu item is stretched:

We have WMware Tools installed:

We would definitely like to get our application to work without these bugs in VMware. Has anyone experienced these problems and know if it is a problem with VMware, XP, WPF, or WPF 4.0?

Answer 1

I had the same problem and based on a VMWare support article http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1011709 I changed my graphics adapter from VMWare SVGA II to the default (native) Windows 7 driver.

This solved the problem for me.

Answer 2

I read this post to install two patches for Visual Studio 2010 and WPF. This solves the problem.

Answer 3

I've found problem with selection and scrolling during code editing. Sometimes the text disappears and other times the selected text becomes unreadable.

If you turn of VMWare SVGA you can't resize the screen at any size. I solved it enabling Aero themes (google for "install aero on windows 8"). Don't ask me how but it solves my problem.