<div>I recently purchased an HP 8710w workstation. After installing VMware workstation 6, the system continuously reboots. After much fiddling and troubleshooting, I have learned the source of the problem although not exactly a definitive solution. The problem is between VMware workstation and HP Protect Tools (Security and single-sign-on). The factory build on the workstation uses 2.00J which is the latest version posted on the HP website. As long as ProtectTools is installed, when the Vmware Authorization Service is started, the LSASS service will crash:</div>bq.<div>Faulting application lsass.exe, version 6.0.6000.16386, time stamp 0x4549afbe, faulting module ItDAC.dll_unloaded, version 0.0.0.0, time stamp 0x45db332e, exception code 0xc0000005, fault offset 0x013ce794, process id 0x2e4, application start time 0x01c81a67f40c3639.</div>
<div>Followed by:</div>bq.<div>A critical system process, C:\Windows\system32\lsass.exe, failed with status code 255. The machine must now be restarted.</div>
<div>If you leave the VMware services in automatic start mode (as the installer leaves them), this will happen before login completes which is why the continuous reboots happened. To try and narrow things down, I've uninstalled all components except for the credential manager component, and it still crashes, even with both single-sign on and application protection features turned off. Only when I completely uninstall protect tools will VMware begin to run. I've posted a similar thread in HP's support forums, but I fear this will be one of those finger-pointing situations where nobody actually looks at the problem. Hopefully someone at VMware will be able to take a look at the conflict and definitively determin if this is rooted in a VMware issue on Vista or if the core is really an HP Protect Tools problem. I also know another customer who has a different model laptop and has the same problem - and the same workaround. Any suggestions from the forum world would be greatly appreciated.</div>
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