Remove WorkStation Completly & Reinstall

[spartan948265]

I recently tried to upgrade to the latest VmWare WorkStation version  and the install completly broke my computer. After system restore  (Windows 7 64-bit) and tried to reinstall but the VMWare system  processes were still in the background and I cannot remove them. I  followed the instructions to MANUALLY remove all traces of workstation  from my computer and apparantly there must be a hidden file because i  still cant remove the processes such as

vmware-usb-arbitrator.exe etc... I want to reinstall vmware but  after running the installer it says there are workstation processes  still runinning and to uninstall them completly before continuing. I  have downloaded the vmware removal utility and it said it had removed  everything but this is completly false. PLEASE HELP ME GET RID OF ALL  THE CRAP SO I CAN REINSTALL WORKSTATION ONCE AGAIN!

I cannot attach the screenshots since the website keeps timing out and and is very slow.

Message was edited by: spartan948265

[continuum]

please tell us the name of the processes that still run

do you use UAC ? - it often is necessary in such corrupted installs to disable it - then you should be able to stop the service from the commandline or service management

[spartan948265]

UAC is permenantly disabled and was disabled after installation of Windows.

The following SERVICES are: VMware NAT Service (PID: 1244) VMUSBArbService (PID: 2784) VMnet DHCP (PID: 3152)

The following PROCESSES are: vmnat.exe *32 vmnetdhcp.exe *32 vmware-usbarbitrator.exe *32

[continuum]

you can not use taskmanager to kill them ?

to get rid of vmware usb arbitrator try

net stop hcmon
net stop vmusbarbservice

if you really cant kill them try to delete this keys
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\VMUSBArbService
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\vmusb
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\hcmon
or better: set start-type to disabled for those services.
Then next reboot should help

for the other two it is similar
try

net stop "VMware NAT Service"

net stop "VMnetDHCP"

[spartan948265]

I did as you asked and th service was stopped on the 2nd try. I redownloaded the latest Workstation 8 Installer and it tried to uninstall the left over fragments of vmware workstation7 and I got the following error. "Error 1316. A network error occured while attempting to read from the file C:\Windows\Installer\vmware workstation.msi"

[continuum]

does this key still exist ?

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\VMware, Inc.

can you read that key ?

try the installer with /clean commandline option

[spartan948265]

That Registry entry was deleted by the removal tool.Those processes are now gone after removing them and restarting the computer. I ran the command and it completed sucessfully. Any thoughts? The installer now says "Error Running Processes Detected. Please close all virtual machines and VMWare related processes.

[spartan948265]

So no one has any idea on how to fix this???

[brianwallace]

Dude, did this ever get resolved? I am having similar issue but on Ubuntu Linux with Workstation 9 and 10.