I have a feeling that thnuclnt only runs to pass along a print job since I don't see it on either machine when nothing is being printed.
The thnuclnt process runs on the host, and is started by vmware-vmx when the VM is powered on (if it has Printing enabled). While the VM is running, you should be seeing multiple thnuclnt processes - it spawns additional child processes for various tasks. An additional child process is spawned to do the print job as well.
Could you check if you see them in Activity Monitor with "All Processes" selected instead of "My Processes". If that's the case, what User are they started by? If it's "root" instead of your username, that may be a problem. Of course, if they're not running at all, that's also a problem.
Do you see the same behavior for the other VM that works correctly? Also, try to see if thnuclnt starts up when you first power on the VM, it's possible that something causes the process to crash.
The new most interesting information is that I tried to disable using the Mac printing while the problematic VM was running and got a diallog box indicating that could not be performed because the serial connection was active (don't remember for sure if I had a manually created a Printer in place at that time or not). I tried disabling using the Mac printer a 2nd time, and this time it crashed the VM, and I'm attaching the VMware log file that covers both of those attempts.
The log shows an error that it wasn't able to delete the temporary directory used by thnuclnt, which means it was either still running, or some files had different permissions that the user can't delete (owned by root, etc).
The last item that I'm wondering if I can do something about is the TPVM port that currently exists on this VM. I don't know when it was created, if it is working properly. By looking through the Registry of the VM it looks like it is using the COM2 port on the Guest, and I do have the Serial Port Device in place on the host (via the VM setup Preference Panels).
The TPVM port is created by the ThinPrint driver, and it is used for the printers added by TPAutoConnect. It uses the virtual serial port to communicate with the host. The .vmx file shows the ThinPrint serial port as serial0, which should be COM1. So if the VM is trying to COM2, that may explain why it's having problems. Do you have any other serial devices in your VM? (Settings -> Other Devices).
You can look under "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ThinPrint\TPAutoConnect" to look at the ThinPrint properties. The "ListenToWTSCreatCmd" string should have the COM port that TPAutoConnect uses. This should match the TPVM port configuration from "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Monitors\ThinPrint Print Port Monitor for VMWare\Ports\TPVM:", and also the .vmx setting (serial0 is COM1, serial1 is COM2, etc). Actually, I think there might be an issue with Windows only seeing two serial ports, so ThinPrint might not work on COM3 and COM4 unless those ports are the Device Manager, but it works on COM1 and COM2 for me.
Is there some orderly set of steps to remove the pieces that support printing via the Mac and then add them back in such that the auto creation of the printer in the guest would occur?
Unchecking the Enabled checkbox in Printers should disconnect the virtual serial port, and prevent thnuclnt from starting. You can enable it while the VM is running to re-connect the serial port and restart thnuclnt (unless you run into the crash you described above).
At this point I suspect I have some registry cleanup to do in the Guest, but not sure what that would be. I'm suspecting that TPAutoConnect sees items in the Guest that make it think the printer was already created even though the printer itself is not there.
Uninstalling Tools should remove the ThinPrint drivers and the TPVM port configuration. But since you already uninstalled and reinstalled Tools, I'm not sure how much of a help that may be. Of course, it's possible that the old settings were not removed from the registry for some reason, and are now interfering with the new setup.
I've been toying with taking the backup of this particular VM prior to the upgrade, bringing it up on VMPlayer on Windows and removing the HP and Bonjour Software and starting over, but that will also mean some data synchronization since I have used the upgraded one for its' intended purpose of work productivity.
The HP and Bonjour software should have no effect on the ThinPrint functionality.
Has VMware put together any white papers or Knowledge Base articles that would give me more details on what is needed on the Guest to support printing through the Host. It is pretty clear to me that my host side stuff is working with the other VM, so it is either something specific to this other VM or the VM itself.
I don't think there's any articles on this besides forum posts. The ThinPrint implementation is new for Fusion 2.0, and I haven't had the time to write anything up yet. I primarily worked on the Fusion UI and host-side support for ThinPrint, and another developer worked on integrating guest-side components in Tools. It's definitely something that we need to document to make troubleshooting easier.
