Suddenly hanging on opening any virtual machines

[Loren_Pechtel]

I'm currently on 14.1.8 but also tried installing an evaluation copy of 16.1.2 and I'm getting exactly the same result.

Everything was fine, I rebooted and I haven't gotten in since.  Originally it just went non-responsive when launched.  Repair did nothing.  Uninstall/reinstall did nothing.  Uninstall, wipe everything I could find that was left behind, reinstall allowed it to come up but really all that changed is it didn't try to deal with a VM on startup, the hang just got moved to when I click on a VM.

SFC /scannow found and fixed some corruption, no change.  Uninstall, install the latest version, no change.

Looking at the filesystem it manages to create the .vmx.lck directory and the file inside before it hangs.  I have tried it with a different VM in case one was corrupted somehow, no change.  When it hangs it can't be killed from the task manager, I have to reboot.

And while I was writing this, even stranger--after several minutes of being non-responsive it loaded up a tab for the virtual machine.  In my attempts to isolate things I moved a file I shouldn't have, it didn't open--I replaced it and tried to close the tab and try again, back to the hung state.  Waiting even longer it hasn't done anything since.

Note that the drive that is hosting it is a SSD that is otherwise working fine--I just copied a 20gb file to it without difficulty.

And the more I play with it the stranger it gets--it's the UI thread that's hanging but not the whole system, I finally got the original VM to boot, it came up normally but shared folders were disabled.  I just watched the VM peacefully reboot while behind a hung settings page.

[wila]

Hi,

That does not immediately ring a bell and is not something that has been reported recently by anyone else.

Suspecting two scenarios:

- a hardware error of some kind, be it RAM or Disk or something else that causes the UI to hang.
- an antivirus product or other antimalware product "protecting" you. Note that these product tend to be so invasive nowadays that disabling them doesn't really disable them and quite often only a full uninstall will allow you to rule them out.

--
Wil

[Loren_Pechtel]

That does seem to explain it--my AV is nuts.  I'm seeing crazy delays but nowhere near that long on going into the exclusion list.  I added the drive that holds the VMs (it has nothing else) and now VMWare is behaving itself.

[wila]

Hi,

Often it is enough to add the .vmdk files to the list (perhaps also .vmsn and vmem).
Excluding the whole drive I guess also works.

--
Wil

[trilala]

I can confirm, same problem.

We have 6 workstations with "VMplayer" (latest version) installed.

They worked flawlessly since November 2020, till today 27.6.2021. VM on every WS hangs on startup (same symptoms on all WS), and host OS reboot is needed.

I'll try with AV recommendation, and get back with results.

[Loren_Pechtel]

I had no reason not to exclude the whole drive--it contains nothing but virtual machines.

[trilala]

All right. We excluded all extensions (*.nvram, *.vmdk, *.vmsd, *.vmx, *.vmxf) found in VM folder in our "kaspersky" AV. All VMs work again.

Thank you all for recommendation