VMware Fusion cannot connect to the virtual machine

[Fusionuser21]

I have an error saying "VMware Fusion cannot connect to the virtual machine". It says "make sure you have rights to run the program and to access all directories it uses and rights to access all directories for temporary files."

I looked at the VM file permissions, user and group. All seems fine.

I have been using Fusion 201 for a while and this morning I got this error.

BTW, I tried to run the FileVault but it said "it will take 8 hours" so I canceled it. Did it matter? Everything else seems OK.

Please let me know if you have any idea.

[Aylavero]

I was using VMware fusion yesterday and everything was fine.. Today, big bug! I get those error messages: see attachments

[Fusionuser21]

Even though I canceled turning on the FileVault, it messed up lots of file permissions (according to the Apple tech support). After I ran the repair disk permission under the disk utility, everything works fine. Thanks for your help.

[berniecase]

I found this after hitting essentially the same problem with Fusion 4.0, and then Fusion 4.1 (when I updated).  Permissions repair didn't quite solve the problem, but it did report ACLs all over the filesystem that I had not expected to see.

User error, as it turns out.  I had set an inheritable ACL on / on my Mac, and that was wreaking some form of havoc with Fusion.  I had to run chmod -R -a to wipe out the ACL.  That chmod command isn't complete... I had to refer to the chmod man page to figure out the right command to use to recursively remove that specific ACL entry from everything in the filesystem.  Whoops.

After I did that, Fusion is back to working normally again.  This was a good discussion for the hint, though, to get me that far.