Regarding the suggestion: "As a general appliccable hotfix, you might consider to use an account being in the admin group while installing, and

being in the user mode while being productive and whenever possible. "

This goes back to the reason for my original post - that according to the

VMware Server Beta release notes under Installing VMware Server on a Windows Host: "Although you must be logged on as an administrator to

install VMware Server, you can run the program after it is installed as a user with normal user privileges." 

In my testing, I did do an install using my normal working login name, temporarily given admin privileges for the install. I then removed admin privileges from my normal login account and found that: 1) my normal login account could launch both the VMware Server Console and the VMware Virtual Machine Console 2) No other login, administrator or not, could open either of these console windows to manage VMware Server.

I understand that I am evaluating on a non-supported host platform (Windows XP Pro). Would the product install registry keys differently on a

different windows server platform? There are about 130 vmappsdk.* keys and 37 vmdbCOM.* keys that have permissions only for the installing

login name and SYSTEM. I suspect that even on a server, local administration of VMware Server using the consoles (not using IIS, remote access, etc.) would be restricted to a single login account.

Thank you for the heads up that this issue also exists on the Workstation product which I have been considering. You understand my point exactly. We should not be using an admin account for normal work, expecially testing! Since no account, admin or not, other than the installing account can run the product, the problem does not appear to be FOLDER permissions, but again, from my non-expert view, appears to be registry restrictions.

Can someone at VMware development comment?

I also see that the VMware Server install added a GROUP named __vmware__ and a USER named __vmware_user__ to Windows XP. Seems like a possible solution would be for the install process to enable VMware Server for the designated GROUP and let the local administrator add users to that group as needed.

The original problem that I reported that started this thread still exists. I uninstalled my last beta VMware server first and then installed the VMware server release 1 from the downloaded VMware-server-installer-1.0.0-28343.exe under Windows XP Pro.  Maybe no one cares about this error since XP PRO is not a "supported host".  How disappointing after 4 months waiting for the general release! The documentation for Installing VMware Server on a Windows Host that states "Although you must be logged on as an administrator to install VMware Server, you can run the program after it is installed as a user with normal user privileges." would be much more accurate if it said "You can run the VMware Server program as a user with normal user privileges ONLY if that user is first temporarily made a local administrator for the purpose of installing VMware Server."