VMs won't start - Workstation 6.5.1 - XP64

[asedge4]

The Problem:

After some time, usually a day or more, I'm unable to start any virtual machines. The machines that I have running continue to run without interruption however when I try to open a machine from my favorites or the disk nothing happens. Sometimes I will get an error that the VM is already in use so I go and delete the lock file/dir and sometimes that will fix it temporarily. I thought the behavior was tied to the fact that I liked to close the Workstation window and choose "Run VMs in Background" so I stopped doing that and the problems persist. Once I reboot the host machine, Windows XP 64 SP2, I'm regain the ability to open all VMs. One thing that I've noticed is that I must forcibly kill the vmware-tray process in order to reboot pretty much every time this happens. Without any logs being generated, nor error messages most of the time, this has become increasingly frustrating.

I'm open to ideas because I'm running out of them, and patience, fast. See below for things I've tried.

What I've Tried:

Deleting any lock directories/files.

Making sure to exclude Virtual Machine directory from virus scan and active protection.

Disable fast user switching.

Disabling system tray icon/app (just did this a short time ago).

[Scissor]

What antivirus are you running on your Host? Any 3rd party firewalls or other security software installed?

[JoeLyons]

Sounds like something i accessing your disks, you excluded your Virus scan, I'd try disabling it for a while just to rule it out.

But give process monitor a try to identify the culprit,

Joe

And if it works let us know what it was.

Remember to back EVERYTHING up before you change ANYTHING

[asedge4]

I'm running AVG (8.0.237) antivirus. No additional firewalls or security software.

[asedge4]

Joe,

I'll give process monitor a shot. So far I'm still able to open all of my VMs, which is an encouraging sign. Usually after a couple of days I'm able to open some but not others. I'm going to leave my antivirus on for now since everything's still working but if I experience the issue again I'll give that a try too.

Thanks!

[asedge4]

Joe,

It happened again. I'll try disabling my antivirus for a while.

This is really bothering me. Workstation worked fine when I was running XP32... these problems only started when I switched to the 64-bit OS. I needed to switch to the 64-bit OS to utilize all the new RAM we bought.

I'm very close to formatting the machine and running a 64-bit Linux OS and using VirtualBox instead. This is about as frustrated as I've ever been with a commercial piece of software and I don't exactly have a ton of time to spend fiddling with this, you know?

Process monitor didn't turn up anything obvious. According to PM it's opening the files... sometimes I even find a lck file/dir in the virtual machine directory but it still doesn't "open" the VM.

Thanks for any help.

-Sean

[asedge4]

So instead of rebooting I manually did a stop/start of the VMware Auth service and I regained the ability to open all the VMs that I have. I stopped all my VMs before I did this because I was about to do a reboot so I'm not sure if it will work when VMs are already running. Previously I just did a restart and that did nothing but a full stop/start seems to have made the issue go away, for now. I'm sure it will be back but this seems to be a reasonable workaround for the time being.

[asedge4]

Unfortunately the issue persists... nothing I've tried seems to be making any difference. The "workaround" from my previous post does not work and only worked once. I tried looking at Process Monitor when trying to open my VMs/Teams but there are no obvious errors. Sometimes lock files/dirs are even created but that happens less frequently than before and the VMs/teams never actually "open"

I'm probably only a week or two away from formatting my box, installing Linux, converting my .vmdk files to .vdi's and using VirtualBox. Anyone have any last minute suggestions that might help me out here?