On a machine that has been remarkably stable for a long time I started seeing the HOST issue Blue screens ( BSOD ) right out from
under Vmware Workstation when any VM is booted or restored.
It would say STOP0 x000000D9 and then disappear before you could read the rest, and you had to reboot the machine.
I had just recently installed SP1 on this machine and suspected that was the cause.
Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit
Intel Core 2 Quad
6Gig ram
Service Pack 1
Vmware Workstation Full 7.1.4-385536
On the advice of Microsoft I had previously use verifier.exe to trap memory errors in pcouffin.sys which was known to
cause corruption in some instances. Pcouffin.sys is part of a DVD burning program for managing video DVDs. Its apparently ancient.
It is not germane to this problem other than the fact that it had induced me to run verifier.exe in the past.
The verifier settings had been in place for many weeks with no problems. But after installing Sp1 I could no longer boot any
VM without the bluescreen, even after a re-install of Workstation.
On the advice of Vmware KB article 2051: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2051
I reset the verifier (which essentially turns off driver verification). In addition I uninstalled the package that used pcouffin.sys. (I'll find a better solution for DVD burning on Linux).
This solved the problem and everything is up and running again.
So I post this MOSTLY for the Google spiders, and for anyone else running into this error.
There were very few hits in Google that were specific to Vmware, and they were dated, and occured prior to the release of Service Pack 1 for Windows 7.
