Full-screen menu-bar hover fails and traps macOS guest

[saltarob]

Full-screen menu-bar hover fails in macOS guest

Host:

• Mac Studio M4 Max
• Host macOS: Tahoe
• Guest macOS: Tahoe 26.5.1
• VirtualBuddy: current version

I am seeing unreliable full-screen and menu-bar behaviour with a macOS Tahoe guest in VirtualBuddy.

When the VM enters full-screen mode, the normal top-edge mouse hover sometimes does not reveal the VirtualBuddy / host menu bar. When that happens, the VM can become effectively trapped in full screen, because I cannot access the VirtualBuddy controls.

One thing I noticed: before entering full screen, I can sometimes improve the behaviour by forcing a redraw of the VM window with the green window button/context menu, so that the guest macOS menu bar becomes visible first. After doing that, the top-edge hover exit works more often. But it is not consistent, and sometimes full screen still gets stuck.

Other related issues:

• The guest macOS menu bar can become visually hidden by the VirtualBuddy / host menu-bar area and may only reappear after resizing or forcing a redraw.
• “Capture system keyboard shortcuts” is inconsistent on Tahoe. Sometimes shortcuts are passed to the guest, sometimes they are still handled by the host.
• In some stuck full-screen cases, VirtualBuddy itself does not quit normally and requires Force Quit.
• When the guest is shutting down or appears frozen, VirtualBuddy does not clearly show whether the VM is running, shutting down, stopped, or hung.
• The red close button shows “Stop Virtual Machine?”, but it is unclear whether this is a graceful stop or a forced power-off.

Questions:

• Is there any known way to make the top-edge hover menu more reliable in full-screen mode?
• Is there a recommended fallback method to access VM controls when the hover menu does not appear?
• Is “Stop Virtual Machine?” a graceful stop request or closer to a forced power-off?
• Are there known Tahoe limitations for “Capture system keyboard shortcuts” with macOS guests?

In short, the VM can become difficult or impossible to control in full-screen mode when the top-edge hover menu does not appear.