I upgraded to 2.0 and now my boot times from a idle restart take 2.5 minutes, when it used to take at most about 30 second. Really annoying. I will run these tests this weekend and let you know what I find out.

Im running Windows XP3 on OS 10.5.5

It is NOT bootcamp. Regular bootcamp created here, not imported.

Allow mac to open applic in VM? (for now, this is set to YES - I'll try it with that UNCHECKED and see if it helps. What's that used for anyway? Dont recall if VM v1 had that checked. Never touched it on either.)

I upgraded VM tools, and also tried reinstalling them (choosing repair.) Didnt help.

The VM appears to be fully upgraded. The upgrade VM is now greyed out. (have not downgraded - will try this weekend)

vmware-vmx is taking up a lot of cpu.

Here is the sample :(attached)

Under activity monitor, system memory, the colored boxes at the bottom show : free:35.46MB wired 1.93GB active 1.36GB inactive 691MB used 3.96

Under settings, I put VM Ram at 3 of 4 gigs originally. That USED TO work great. Super fast all around VM and no prob on OS. Ive tried it with 2 or 3 GB allocated to VM. Bad either way. I also now get the spinning rainbow pinwheel during boot which I never ever saw before.

Havent checked acitivty monitor during boot. (weekend task)

Attached vmwar.log It is FULL of all sorts of errors it looks like.

Attached system profiler file.

thanks for any help you can provide. I used to REALLY love running windows on my iMac, but now, I feel like Im back in the old world with tons of windows problems and slow performance.

In addition to the slow boot, FYI, performance is also slower. The part of boot that seems to take longest is the final network connection, so that my wireless works. Then MS Outlook takes a long time to load. Mozilla firefox takes 10 seconds to start, and loads pages slowly. Excel has slow arrow scrolling issues. Something is just killing the system.

geoff

1) Windows Server Standard 2008, Service Pack 1, 32-bit

2) Boot Camp VM

3) I have now disabled "Allow your Mac to open applications...", and it seemed to make no difference

4) Tools were already upgraded. I uninstalled, and the boot seemed amazingly fast. CPU went to 100% during the following login and reconfigure (idenitifying new hardware, installing devices), though disk activity was flat-lined. System performance seems snappy, boots and shut-downs are fast.

5) I have not downgraded the hardware--not comfortable with that option yet (won't that cause my apps to re-validate?)

6) vmware-vmx is routinely the top CPU process, though it is very erratic (does not normally go into the 60-80% range for more than 90 seconds, then down to the 20's for 90 seconds, and back).

7) No abnormal disk usage except immediately after login, when things seem to get very slow

8) There are no mentions of READ/WRITEs taking a long time.

Since removing VM Tools, system seems back to normal behavior.

It's not a Boot Camp VM, but it was originally created in VMWare Workstation (Windows version). When I first opened it in Fusion, Windows went through the expected steps of reinstalling system devices and drivers etc.

"Allow Mac to open applications" is enabled. Disabling it doesn't seem to be making a difference.

Tools were upgraded. Didn't try to uninstall.

Didn't try to downgrade VM.

I think I know what is causing problem in my case because I can fix and repeat it on demand:

The VM's HDD is set to be 40GB, dynamic grow. When the VM was on a non FAT32 partition, the VM's .VMDK was in just one file. At that time, Fusion 2 would start this VM just fine. No wait time, no nothing.

I moved the VM to a FAT32 partition, and that required me to convert the VM's HDD to 2GB files. It resulted in 22 or so .VMDK files, all but two of which were only ~300K in size. Since moving to 2GB slice model for VMDK, the slow down has started.

I hope this helps.

FAT32 is on an internal disk, and it is the SAME disk that used to be formatted as NTFS (back then, the VM used to be a single file, and ran fine). I had to move off NTFS because Google's NTFS driver was causing my drives to crash and corrupt.

I have deleted the single disk version of VM (just last night) to free up disk space, but I can recreate the VM, and do the tests for you if you want. Let me know if the above info is not enough and you want to do any more testing.

thx

I am running Windows XP Pro SP3 and Mac OS 10.5.5 with VM Fusion 2.0 on a Mac Book Pro. My Windows partition is a Boot Camp partition and I have experienced the hang at the welcome screen when booting using VM Ware and when booting natively. I had upgraded VM Fusion to 2.0 prior to enabling the Boot Camp partition. Two things occurred last night:

1) Windows Update ran and downloaded 7 updates while I was running the Boot Camp partition through VM ware.

2) Longer story - I have an external USB drive that was showing up in the Virtual Machine Library as bootable (which it isn't). I was trying to remove this option. Still can't seem to get it out when that drive is plugged in no matter what I do...so, I tried doing a few things...I tried copying the com.vmware.plist file to com.vmware.plist.old in Library > Preferences so that the system would recreate a new one (and hopefully remove the"dummy" drive option. I also tried removing the device options in Library > Application Support > VM Fusion > Virtual Machines > Boot Camp (there were two, one for the real one and one for the dummy) After doing this removal, VM ware hung for the first time on the welcome screen when booting, after a while, it re installed VM tools, even though it was already installed in Windows. After a restart or two, it seemed to speed up, but I was also prompted in install McAfee for the free trial upon another login. I said 'don't show me again' since it was already installed. Again, the boot up seemed to not hang as much after the initial one or two restarts; however, I then booted natively into the Windows partition and it hung at the welcome screen for an uncomfortably long time. It played the start up music and instead of going to the desktop, just waited. Once it did get to the desktop, it seemed that everything was already loaded in the task bar by the clock.

So, I'm not sure it was it Windows Update (which I suspected) or my trying to get the "dummy" partition out of my Virtual Machine Library that did it. Both things kind of happened simultaneously. I was working from a pretty clean install and I did my upgrades prior to activating the Boot Camp partition. The only other thing that I can think of that is a little different is that I also recently started to use Time Machine and I have an external drive hooked up to the other USB boot for those backups.

I was very unimpressed with the hanging and as other users commented loved the fact that the Windows boot was very fast up until now. I did not try rebooting natively again or running VM ware again after that happened (it was getting to be very late for me) I also wish I could permanently remove the external USB drive from my Library as it shows up and only shows up when it is plugged into that USB port. It does not show up when it is plugged into the other USB port, but that problem probably requires another posting on another thread.

Thanks.