At the last help meeting, one of our members was having a problem with running Windows under VMware Fusion. Whenever he closed and re-opened the lid to his MacBook Pro, the guest Windows operating system would pop up a dialog saying that a device had been inserted, and offering to locate a driver for it.
What’s happening here is that the Apple iSight camera is an internal USB device, but on the same USB bus as external devices. Apparently when the Mac goes to sleep or the lid is closed, the iSight is powered down. When it reappears, the guest OS sees that as a USB device being plugged in.
The solution is easy. Since most people do not plan on actually using the iSight with Windows, just turn off access to it in the virtual machine. In Fusion, it was under a Devices/USB menu, and the option was there to enable or disable the iSight camera. Once it was disabled — no more annoying popups. Turning it off in the virtual machine has no effect on your Macintosh software, so your Mac applications can continue to use the iSight as always.
There is a similar option in Parallels as well.
-Jamie
