Hi,
first of all I'd like to address the VMware support/VMware, Inc. and would like to express my dismay at the fact that 30 day installation support is no longer included with an upgrade purchase.
Now to the problem at hand. I upgraded to VMware 12.5.5 about two weeks ago. Since then I have experienced an issue never seen before. My host is running Windows 7 x64 Ultimate N with all applicable updates applied. The guest running while the issue occurs is a Windows 10 x64 Pro N, also with all applicable updates applied. The host has 32 GB RAM and after the issue occurred a few times I made sure to run the memory test diagnostic tool offered from the boot menu by Windows 7 (I have not yet run the Memtest86, though). No issues were found by this diagnostic tool.
For the issue to surface a VMware guest seems to have to be running, possibly has to be running in full-screen also. Which is the reason I am attributing this squarely to the recent VMware upgrade. Now the fault may not lie with VMware directly (think of some loaded DLL wreaking havoc), but the connection between the issue and VMware is evident.
I have a dual monitor setup. When the VMware guest runs full-screen on the monitor 1 (right side) whereas I have other host windows on monitor 2 (left side), it will frequently start to flicker like crazy. This causes all kinds of crazy window resizing, which in turn has caused occasional crashes on affected applications (notably some MFC applications). Moreover, whenever a bit of the screen gets redrawn so that I can see what's going on (at times large parts are simply black), I can see that the display resolution of the VMware guest seems to change. The guest screen shows a distorted (stretched horizontally) low-resolution (?) desktop at that point, but soon recovers to full resolution (matching host resolution for monitor 1). However, on the host the least that happens is that explorer.exe crashes. I've also had the Desktop Window Manager crash. In addition I now see the VMware service crash at least once daily, but usually not more than once, recovering quickly afterward (also according to the event log).
While it happens, notably the Windows taskbar is drawn at the top of screen 1 along with the status bar of the VMware Workstation window showing "To direct input to this VM, ..." overlaying the top of the taskbar (normally it'd appear above the task bar in windowed mode).
Can anyone provide any advice other than downgrading VMware? (which would mean I just wasted a considerable amount of money)
Thanks!
PS: Some details about my system:
OS Name Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate N
Version 6.1.7601 Service Pack 1 Build 7601
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3610QM CPU @ 2.30GHz, 2301 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s)
Installed Physical Memory (RAM) 32.0 GB
Adapter Description NVIDIA Quadro K3000M
Adapter RAM (2,147,483,648) bytes
Driver Version 21.21.13.7711
Resolution 1920 x 1080 x 60 hertz
