"The virtual machine is busy" error

[MarAndreas]

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

[MarAndreas]

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.

[MarAndreas]

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.

[LaloGupta]

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.