Brian On Software

At Avanade, we tend to develop all of our projects in controlled virtual environments for obvious reasons.  I am a big fan of VMWare products, notably VMWare Workstation, but at work we use Microsoft Virtual PC 2007.  Something annoying happened with Virtual PC this week.  For some obscure reason, the Virtual PC Console simply didn’t show up or disappeared from the screen every time I clicked on it via the taskbar.  At first, I thought the application crashed, but Process Explorer showed me otherwise, as I could clearly see that the Virtual PC process was running.  The problem seems to be that the screen position of the Virtual PC Console window was modified in the configuration file used by it.  I don’t know why that happened, but I do know how to fix it.

Here are the steps to follow if the Virtual PC Console window doesn’t show up or tends to disappear every time you click on it via the taskbar:

1. Make sure none of the virtual machines are currently running.  If they are, save their sessions or shut them down.  Also, kill the Virtual PC process if it’s still running.  Have no mercy.
2. If you’re using Windows XP, go to the Documents and Settings\$USER$\Application Data\Microsoft\Virtual PC folder.  If you’re using Windows Vista, go to the Users\$USER$\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Virtual PC folder.  Both of these root directories should be located in your system drive (C:\ for most users).
3. Edit the Options.xml file with your favorite text editor (Notepad++ of course!)
4. Search for the <window> element because it holds the location information for the console window (in my case, the <window> element was located at the end of the file).  Refer to Figure 1 for an example of what the <window> element looks like.
5. Take a look at the values for both the <left_position> and <top_position> elements.  These values (4294935296) seem way out of proportion for our current monitors and screen resolutions don’t you think?  Change the value of these elements to something more realistic, such as 100.  Take a look at Figure 2 to see what I mean by that.
6. Save the file and launch Virtual PC again.  This time you should see the Console window in the top and left part of the screen.

Figure 1. We can clearly see that the values for the left (<left_position>) and top (<top_position>) don’t make sense.

Figure 2. We simply changed the values for the left and top position to something more realistic.