Actually, that's not correct. I had it in full screen with no user interface at all, and when I moved my mouse an interface with play, pause, etc. and the min:seconds would show up and then go away shortly.
That was with 4.1.1. I set some preference to get that to work.
The 4.1.4 install asked about saving preferences at the start, then then overwrote them at the end (I believe it gave another option, and I'd already told it I wanted to keep my preferences and cache and not overwrite them.
I had it working two days ago. That feature is there, it's just hidden somewhere. A popup control with play, stop, etc. and time.
OK, I figured it out! Here's how to get an interface that pops up in full screen.
In Preferences->Video Settings, check 'fullscreen'.
Open a video and set to 'minimal view' and 'full screen' close VLC.
Open a movie with VLC and now you have this working.
However .... On my XP-32 SP3 box, when I do that and attempt to close VLC, it hangs. I have to use task manager to kill it. This is 100% repeatable, and didn't happen with 4.1.1.
On Win7-64 4.1.4, it doesn't hang.
If I stop VLC, disable the full screen interface, I can quit on XP without a hang. All this is 100% repeatable.
Only thing about my machine that might be slightly unique is I did this to BOTH my Win7 and XP machines:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2264107
set HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\CWDIllegalInDllSearch to DWORD FFFFFFFF
Thanks!