After years of working, my vmware fusion app is crashing within a few minutes of running windows xp, has anyone seen something similar to this?

[bmm1104]

For whatever reason, after 2 years of working fine, my vmware is having an issue running windows xp.  I can boot up the windows and get to my desktop but usually within 5 minutes I get the attached error in the screen shot.  Continue, and retry never work.  All I can do is abort, which instantly turns off my windows, continue and retry typically freeze up even my mac as well unit prompted with the same choice again and I have to hit abort.  I have no idea why his is happening, can anyone offer any tips?

Thanks!

[WoodyZ]

Failing, problematic and or defective hardware can/will cause issues regardless of whether attached to a physical or virtual machine.  Obviously one needs to be sure that at the physical level all hardware is working properly without any issues before troubleshooting it in a Virtual Machine.

[clayj]

I don't buy this explanation. While I can see that core hardware (your Mac's internal HD, stuff like that) has to be functioning perfectly, I'm talking about an EXTERNAL USB hard drive here -- one that was being used ONLY for Windows Backup. If a drive stops responding, the proper response is to cut it off and stop trying to talk to it -- NOT to hang the entire VM and the VMware Fusion process.

Put bluntly, it seems that VMware Fusion is far, far too susceptible to complete, unrecoverable program hangs when even minor host hardware issues occur. This needs to be addressed. I went through a month of nights and weekends trying to figure out what was wrong, only to come up with a THEORY (because it hasn't been proved yet) that a $79 USB external hard drive was somehow causing Fusion to lose its mind.