I have just turned off all the automatic update checks and will no longer update VMware software to the latest version unless it is the only way to resolve an issue that cannot be worked around by some other means. Why? Because there appears to be what I consider to be serious flaws in the update process.
A couple of months ago I installed VMware Player v4.0.2 on a Windows 7 Enterprise x64 machine and it worked beautifly. Then earlier this week when I started Player, its automatic update check told me there was a new version, so I downloaded and installed it, which entailed uninstalling the old version first.
Ever since then the system has significant lag when starting programs that use the network, like Internet Explorer or Windows Live Messenger and VMware Player now frequently stops responding for 10 to 20 seconds at a time regardless of whether a virtual machine is running or not. Neither of these issues existed prior to the update of the VMware software.
I encountered this same problem with VMware updates on an old Windows XP machine and at the time figured it was caused by the old XP install, but now it appears that that was not the case and that it is a problem with VMware's installer/uninstaller. From experience I also know that going back to v4.0.2 won't fix the issue because it doesn't appear to be a problem with the software itself but how it is uninstalled and/or installed.
I can easily solve the network lag problem by uninstalling VMware but that would mean I could no longer use VMware on this machine because reinstalling it would restore the network lag issue as well as the VMware frequently freezing my entire system.
I hope somebody has an answer to this. I rather be able to continue using VMware but not if it is going to cause problems on my system.
