Can upgrade or uninstall VMWare Tools on Windows 10 under Fusion

[GuyLarri]

When I try to upgrade VMWare Tools the installer starts and runs for a while then fails and says "rolling back action" and gives an error dialog box "VMware Tools Setup Wizard ended prematurely because of an error. Your system has not been modified." etc.

When I try to manually uninstall VMWare tools by going in Windows 10 to App & features and clicking uninstall on VMware Tools, I get the permission-for-app-to-modify-machine dialog, the installer runs "gathering information" and then silently fails.

In Windows 10, looking under Computer Administration at the Application Logs I see:

Windows Installer installed the product. Product Name: VMware Tools. Product Version: 10.3.2.9925305. Product Language: 1033. Manufacturer: VMware, Inc.. Installation success or error status: 1603.

I am running VMWare Fusion Professional 11.0.1 on MacOS Mojave 10.14.1

The client is Windows 10 Enterprise. Version 1703. OS Build 15063.1387 (64-bit operating system).

[agalliasistju]

You can try this on the VM side of things:

VMware Knowledge Base

I recently had this issue myself and ended up using this plus a combination of other things to clean up the registry before I could get the newest version of the tools to install properly.  Start with this and let me know if you need more assistance to clean things up.

[GuyLarri · Accepted solution]

Thank you for the suggestion agalliasistju​

Unfortunately that did not help.

I turned on Windows Installer logging by following the instructions here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/223300/how-to-enable-windows-installer-logging

https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/223300/how-to-enable-windows-installer-logging

I then attempted to install again, which failed, and I inspected the logs. I found this line:

2018-10-17T14:51:06.601+01:00| BootStrapper-build-9925305| I2: Util_FileExists: Did not find file/directory: "C:\cygwin64\home\guylar01\tmp\\vmreboot.tmp"| posix code 2 (No such file or directory)

I thought the double backslash in the path name after tmp looked syntactically incorrect.

Also later in the log file this line:

2018-10-17T14:51:58.783+01:00| inst-build-9925305| W1: Setting temp directory root failed.

All of this reminded me that I had set the TEMP environment variable for the User to the non-standard value of C:\cygwin64\home\guylar01\tmp\

The log file contained the line: Property(S): TempFolder = C:\cygwin64\home\guylar01\tmp\

I guessed that this might be the cause of problems, so I changed the value of the TEMP environment variable to C:\TMP

and the install worked perfectly.

So for some reason the VMWare tools installer is sensitive to the location of the temporary files folder specified by the User TEMP environment variable.

Anyway, problem solved.