VMWare Player freezes when I launch a VM by double-clicking the .vmx file

[bemymonkey]

Hi everyone, I'm having a strange issue on my desktop: When I open a VM by double-clicking the .vmx file, the VMWare Player opens (empty) and doesn't do anything. VMWare Player then uses about 50% CPU on a single core indefinitely, and nothing happens even if I wait for half an hour. Resource monitor (host system is Win7 Pro) shows no disk activity...

If I open VMWare Player from the Start Menu and open the virtual machine from there, everything works fine. This isn't a big problem tbh, but I'm so used to just double-clicking .vmx files that it's pretty annoying, and I'm wondering what the issue is.

Anyone else having this issue? Player is up to date and this happens with any VM.

[MarAndreas]

Sounds a lot like a problem I had a while ago:

"The virtual machine is busy" error

Back then, I just stopped trying to open .vmx files directly.

I tried to reproduce the issue right now, but it didn't happen - maybe because I replaced my harddrive since then?

[bemymonkey]

That's the exact same issue... I'll try unplugging some USB stuff...

-edit- Nope, didn't help... even with everything (including keyboard and mouse - controlling via Synergy) unplugged, it still hangs. Weird...

[MarAndreas]

I just re-checked my Event Logs to try to figure out if my old HD was already causing trouble when I had the problem - yep, quite a few disk controller errors in the "System" log.

Well, I feel stupid - replacing the disk back then would have saved me quite a bit of trouble a few months later.

Anyway, I suggest looking through the logs for anything similar - you may want to use a filter to hide the "Information" events, I think that's why I missed the disk errors...