VMAUTHDSERVICE not running after upgrade

[rawbear]

I have just upgraded from VMWare Workstation 6.03 to 6.5 and VMAuthdService will not start, even with manual intervention. I get "error 1067: The process terminated unexpectedly". The old version had no problems. Nothing else has changed on this computer.

I can still start VMWare if I do it as "Administrator" but of course some features are disabled because of the service refusing to start. The Services log doesn't give additional details.

[jsa]

> The Services log doesn't give additional details.

Which is no excuse for YOU not giving any additional details...

Host versions, hardware, etc... The usual.

[rawbear]

Sorry. New to this.

HP desktop with quad core intel CPU. Running Vista SP1 as host. Guest OS is XP SP3 and Ubuntu. Plenty of RAM and Hard Disk space. I recovered from a System Restore point to before the initial install of 6.5 and re-installed 6.5 again. No success. DHCP and NAT services are running ok.

I tried totally de-installing/cleaning the Registry and re-installing and it still doesn't work.

I also tried VMWare Player, which also relies on VMAuthdService. No success.

I end up with errors reported in the logs (this from file vmware-vix-...):

Sep 28 17:49:41.842: app| CnxAuthdConnectPipe: Returning false because CreateFileW failed, error: 2

Sep 28 17:49:41.842: app| CnxAuthdConnect: Returning false because CnxAuthdConnectPipe failed

Sep 28 17:49:41.842: app| CnxConnectAuthd: Returning false because CnxAuthdConnect failed

Sep 28 17:49:41.842: app| Cnx_Connect: Returning false because CnxConnectAuthd failed

Sep 28 17:49:41.842: app| Cnx_Connect: Error message: Could not connect to pipe
.\pipe\vmware-authdpipe: The system cannot find the file specified

Sep 28 17:49:41.843: app| VixVM_FinalRelease: Close VM socket.