ubuntu virtual machine - embarrassing - vmware tools issue caused by zoom accessibility feature

I hope this content is OK here and welcome for sharing.

I had an issue that in the end I found it very funny. However, it was very frustrating for me for days!

The issue

I discovered an issue in one of my virtual machines. The issue was that I suddenly started seeing trailing squares of the desktop when I moved the mouse around. I thought a recent update of ubuntu, vmware workstation, or even Windows 10 must have caused the issue. I downloaded the latest nVidia graphics drivers, Intel graphics drivers. No luck. I checked vmware tools. It appeared to be fine. I could browse my shared folder. The desktop resolution resized when I stretched the window. So vmware tools was good then?

But I could not figure out my issue and at this point I was wasting hours trying to hunt this down. I spent many hours searching google for the answer to no avail. My issue was not described anywhere. I installed another virtual machine of ubuntu. No problem with it, although I did notice the mouse did flicker when I moved it a bit so maybe it was related? idk. So at this point I knew it was just this one machine with a high degree of probability. I checked my xorg config after seeing posts about that. I tried various other things with no luck. I tried Wayland. Wayland had the issue too. "What is it!?" I thought." I checked the logs. Nothing interesting.

I gave up. I lived with the issue and continued to study what I had to study. This was very annoying as the screen started to become littered with trailing squares of desktop when I moved the mouse. I tried not to move the mouse as much. I found out I could click and it would redraw the screen. I started doing that a lot.

Finally, I had enough. I purged vmware tools. I rebooted. I installed vmware tools. I rebooted. Nothing!! What!?.

The solution

Then for some reason I noticed my virtual machine was in airplane mode because the bluetooth icon was not appearing in the menu. That made me curious and I clicked on the accessibility menu. There I noticed that the "zoom" feature was enabled. I disabled it. Voila! My issue is gone.

Don't make my mistake. :smile: