Hi,
What guest OS are you running?
Does the guest OS match the guest OS setting in the Virtual Machine Settings -> General screen?
Try a uninstall VMware Tools - reboot VM - install VMware Tools.
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Wil
Hi,
The times of "copying files into \Windows\System32" really are gone and are more likely to cause harm as solve anything, so I do advise to forego that troubleshooting step in the future.
The error at least indicates that you are missing a part of the Visual C runtime that VMware Tools depends on.
On my Windows 10 VM that has the same VMware Tools version, it also has installed the "Microsoft Visual C++ 2017 Redistributable" for both x86 and x64, so most likely the problem is there.
My suggestion to try a "repair install" on those runtime components in "Control Panel" -> "Programs and Features" -> "Microsoft Visual C++ 2017 Redistributable" and see if that helps.
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Wil
Hi,
It seems, the VMware Tools want to have the api´s at another place.
You probably already tried that, but did you reboot after installing the Visual C++ runtime component and before installing VMware Tools?
Getting the idea that something funky is going on with your system %PATH% like going over a limit in length, but that's just me wondering.
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Wil
Hi,
Windows uses so called environment variables in order to know where to look for certain files.
One of the commonly used such variables is called the PATH variable.
In a windows command prompt type:
echo %PATH%
and you will see all the paths in the system that are being searched when a file is not in the current folder.
This PATH variable has a fixed length, not sure.. something like 2048 characters.
Just looked it up and the doc says that the limit was 32768 characters, but that limitation should have been lifted after Windows Vista/Server 2003.
However in certain circumstances... you can still hit a limit of 2048 characters (see also: What is the maximum length of an environment variable? – The Old New Thing )
So I suggest to look at the output of the above and see if the output looks like a part of it got trimmed.
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Wil
Hi,
Sorry I had intended to setup a test VM down here matching your specs and see if I could reproduce it, but work came up, so this test was moved forward in time.
The "copy ... file into Windows\System32" ... eeks...
Next time please copy those files into the VMware Tools folder, it should also solve the problem and not pollute the windows system folders.
As mentioned in an earlier answer "copying files manually into Windows\System32" should really never be needed, so I'm a bit confused why you bump into this.
The only thing I can come up with right now is if you have done the "copy into system" folders on this machine before with an older set of the same library.
That could explain this problem.
But that is just a guess and it might just as well have been due to something else. For example this wasn't very uncommon in the past where Windows installers of various applications would copy files into the windows system32 folder. It was one of several reasons the expression "Dll Hell" got popular for Windows.
Another nice tidbit is that the system32 folder carries the 64 bit DLLs on an x64 system and the SysWOW64 folder the 32 bits variants.
Anyways I'm happy that you found a fix and thanks for letting us know how you fixed it.
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Wil