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.