External HDD USB Issue on Host

[Onyx1]

After installing the latest Workstation 6.5.0.118116 I have lost the ability to detect USB external Harddrives on the system. If I cold Boot - Power completely off then on with it connected, it works. If try to to hot plug it, the OS eventually locks up. Can't open Device manager, Disk Management, explorer etc. USB Memory Sticks seem to be ok. I have tried two different good harddrives on two different systems with the same result.

This is a trial verision as we were hoping that VMWare would be a good solution to ensure a smooth migration from our old laptops to new ones. However, I am hesitant to continue down this path now.

Uninstalling the VMWare Workstation did not resolve the issue. Nor did installing an older version of VMPlayer that work previously.

I am a very Frustated potential customer.

[guyrleech]

What is the host Operating System? Does this happen with Workstation not running? Any possibly relevant event log entries? Is Workstation set to automatically map USB devices into guests?

Not that it helps you but all external drives I've tried on my Vista Enterprise SP1 x86 laptop work just fine. Notification disappeared but that was fixed by setting the "NoDriveTypeAutoRun" REG_DWORD value to 251 decimal in the registry key "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer".

[Onyx1]

XP Professional

Yes with workstation not running

no event log entries

Automatically mapping - whatever the default is