I had this same issue on a 2000 p2v and it was spanish. I went into the control panel, regional options and everything looked correct, locale was set to English (United States) below language was set to Western Europe and United States, but when I checked a second launguage it popped up the locale box and that was set to Spanish, changed to English (united states) applied, unchecked the additional launguage, rebooted and the next attempt to install VMware tools worked correctly. Also found that my Office toolbar was set to spanish.
