VMware Workstation Guest Stuck at 1280×800

Bybwright

This one looked like a Kali Linux display problem at first.

The VM was stuck at 1280×800, higher resolutions appeared in xrandr, and changing the resolution manually only caused it to snap right back. I checked VMware Tools, XFCE, the virtual display adapter, and even downloaded a fresh Kali VMware image.

Same problem.

That was the clue.

Since two separate Kali VMs behaved exactly the same way, the issue was not inside Kali at all. It was VMware Workstation’s per-user configuration on the Windows host.

The fix was simple:

  1. Close VMware Workstation.
  2. Rename:
%APPDATA%\VMware

to:

VMware.old
  1. Restart VMware Workstation.

VMware recreated the folder with fresh settings, and the guest display immediately started resizing normally again.

Sometimes the best troubleshooting step is realizing you have been interrogating the wrong operating system.

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