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Leaving VirtualBox

Pete Lombardo

After testing a virtual machine in VirtualBox, I decided to move to a different hypervisor. I removed the VirtualBox tools and after rebooting, I could no longer use my mouse. The following devices showed up with yellow exclamation marks in Windows XP.

HID-compliant mouse
PS/2 Compatible Mouse

After much research, I could not find a solution online. In the end, I managed to fix the issue on my own. Here is what I did to resolve this issue.

  1. Open regedit as an administrator.
  2. Expand HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and then SYSTEM.
  3. Click on CurrentControlSet.
  4. Search for “mouse”. The first entry returned should have a string for “UpperFilters”. If it is not there, repeat the search until you see an entry for “UpperFilters”.
  5. Double-click UpperFilters and remove the reference to the VBox driver. It should only say “mouclass” at this point.
  6. Click ok to complete the changes.
  7. Reboot.

At this time, your mouse should be working again.