Steven's Notebook

Look Ma - No Hands!

VMWare Fusion vs GoToMeeting – who’s in charge?

I keep running into an odd problem with GoToMeeting on my Mac – when I try to open a meeting via URL, it launches a VMWare Fusion session (presumably to try to launch GoToMeeting in Windows) instead of just using the perfectly-functioning GoToMeeting for Macintosh application that exists on my system.

The first place I tried to fix this was from within Fusion. In Fusion’s Settings, I opened Default Applications. and made sure that both Open Mac files… and Open your Windows files… were unchecked. Clicking the Configure button, I also removed all default apps so it is blank. I also tried the Restore Defaults button – be careful with that one if you’ve already done any sort of customization to your Fusion setup.

No dice – no matter what, every time click a GTM hyperlink, Fusion still insisted on opening the Virtual machine.

The solution, I found in a community forum, is a bit more complex and dangerous-looking but it works:

try clearing out the helper applications:
– Make sure Fusion isn’t running
– Get inside the .vmwarevm bundle of the offending virtual machine (see Information Gathering for VMware Fusion on how to find that.)
– Delete the Applications folder there.

This last step may be overkill – it appears that may just need to delete any/all objects in that folder with GoToMeeting in their name.

Though the title of the community post I found this in is “How to PERMANENTLY stop Fusion from opening apps in the VM instead of on my Mac?” – this solution isn’t permanent. Every time you (accidentally) open a GTM hyperlink from within a VM, this “helper application” object gets created, so you’ll probably have to come back and do this on a fairly regular basis.

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