I've been getting this problem lately:
When trying to start a VM, VMware Player just sits there, doing nothing; the VM does not boot.
Trying to close the VMware Player window brings up the error message "The virtual machine is busy" - this error message can not be closed.
Task Manager shows the vmplayer.exe process is using as much CPU as it can get, and the vmware-vmx process has not started.
Killing the vmplayer process closes the windows, but does not solve the problem - trying to start the VM again has the same result as above.
Killing both vmplayer and vmware-usbarbitrator64 does help, although the VM seems to boot slower than usual.
Host is Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit
Guest is Windows XP Professional SP3
Player version is 5.0.1 build-894247
Oooohh.... kay....
Unplugging all USB devices seems to work just as well as killing the usbarbitrator process.
Tried if I could narrow it down to one specific USB device, and found that the situation is improved (but not quite fixed) by removing...
...an empty cable.
My probably last update on the issue:
The problem does not occur when starting a VM from the library, instead of opening the vmx directly.
Sometimes VMware Player will be "Not Responding" for a while, but eventually the Library shows up, and everything works fine from there.
I believe the underlying cause is the same (and USB-related), but since this form of it is only occassionally annoying, I can live with it.
Thank you MarAndreas!
This was super helpful. I have not isolated the failure BUT in my case I unplugged all USB devices and it work. I think it is related with a USB hub.