I have been looking for several days to find a solution to the title's problem. I had a virtual machine that was working fine for more than 3 years however it "broke down" and I decided to create a new one with the latest version of lubuntu for guest (I tried other distributions too of course). I deleted and recreated the vms more than 15 times!!! and tried every solution I found on the world wide web like installing vmtools reinstalling vmware changing usb compatibility from version 3 to version 2 etc. But nothing worked. Every time all usb devices were disabled and I couldnt enable them with right click. This thing is infuriating. Please tell me there is a way to fix it, I really dont want to switch to virtualbox.
Molte grazie!
For some inexplicable reason, VMware Player, from a certain version onwards, creates virtual machines with all USB ports disabled, even if the user does not select such option in the gui configuration wizard.
The aforementioned option can be changed only by editing the <vm_name>.vmx file, located in the same path as the VM.
That being said, all you need to do is change the value of this line:
usb.restrictions.defaultAllow = "FALSE"
from FALSE to TRUE.