Windows lock screen becomes full screen in coherence

I have a Windows 7 guest OS installed and attached to the domain at work that I run in coherence mode. The Windows domain policy requires that all client machines automatically lock after 10 minutes of inactivity. I cannot be excluded from that policy. The problem is that when the Windows guest OS locks, Parallels brings the "CTRL-ALT-DEL" Windows notification screen to the front, hiding anything I was working on at the time in the Mac host OS. Is there a way to tell Parallels to not show that lock screen? Failing that is there a way to prevent that lock screen from going full screen and hiding whatever I'm working on? I don't want to have to lose coherence mode, but this problem is starting to affect my productivity. Thanks.

 

I'm experiencing this same problem. Any fix?

 

Hi,

Seems our feature what is called "Fullscreen on Demand" needs to be improved . You can turn it off in the VM settings. Just select Coufigure... menu item in the Virtual Machine menu. Select Options pane, click Coherence. Turn off "Allow applications to switch to fullscreen".

Thank you for the bug!

Alex

 

Hi Alex,

I just gave this a try, but it didn't seem to impact the behavior. When the lock kicked in, I still received a fullscreen Windows lock screen on my primary desktop, even though my only open Coherence window was on a different desktop.

I did find a suggestion of a piece of software called Caffeine (http://www.zhornsoftware.co.uk/caffeine/) that is an effective workaround. Perhaps you could add this function in a future version of the Parallels tools.

Thanks,
John

 

JohnNN,

I see. It is not a fullscreen. It just Windows login window which has such big window. We can't reduce size of that window because we do not know about it. In Coherence mode we operate with original window size and never change it. RandallNi claims about their group policy and for sure he can't use Caffeine, otherwise he had disabled the lock screen already.

JohnNN why you do not disable Lock screen inside Windows?

Alex

 

Our company has the same "policy" to lock screens on a 10 min basis... they even force this policy on servers that need to be unlocked for processes to run.

Here is a little program (created with AutoHotKeys) that nudges the mouse 1 pixel every minute. Add it to your startup folder in Windows, and only worry about needing to log into Windows when you want... not when you are forced.

http://refactoror.net/mousey/

 

I see this is an old thread but I have just switched from VMWare Fusion to Parallels and this is bugging me. Fusion does not have this problem. Perhaps they are using mouse motion on the MAC side to keep the Windows session "awake"? I don't want to slow down my VM by adding any more software to it than necessary. Parallels should fix this if possible please!

 

Hello Randy,
I have the same problem.
I also moved from VMWare Fusion and there works fine (no blocking).
Any update on this problem?

Regards,
Ck.