No, it's not normal for Win 7 - sorry if I was unclear - the 4 hours was to find the problem and fix it on 4 upgraded VMs and all the many reboots, shutdowns and startups that were necessary to fix all 4 VMs. The problem turned out to be actually 3 different types of problems.
Win 7 needs less than a miniute to do a hardware scan. but the different manipulations required several shut downs, then add or remove the sound card on the VMware settings, then reboot etc.
In summary, the best way (i did on the last VM and was fastest) is to
1. delete ALL the sound cards in Win 7 using the device manager. Then
2. shut down Win 7. Then
3. delete soundcard from VMware device settings for that machine.
4. In some cases it may be better to now reboot the host (optional, may flush cached devices)
5. reboot Win 7
6. Shutdown win 7
7. Add sound card in VMware device settings for that machine.
8. Boot Win 7, and it should detect and add sound card (if VMware Tools are installed and updated)
I had for example multiple instances of a phantom sound card on one of the machines (I assume from failed installs by VMware Tools), so until they all got removed and flushed out (reboot, yup), it would not work. I found a KB article on MS support site how to flush the drivers on the Win 7 side, but that did not work. They had 4 methods, and I gave up after 2 of them...
Now it's just a distant memory...
One other observation: in some cases, if you have multiple VMs running and doing HW installs, there seems to be a non-documented interaction. One machine hung completely, but after I shut down another one, it recovered and resumed on its own - not sure why.
Good Luck!
