I've been using VMware for a long time.
I don't need/want USB connections into my VMs, nor do I need/want access to the VM UI from anywhere except my local console. Nice features, I just don't need 'em.
In the past I have disabled all the settings for these things, and have set vmware-hostd.exe and vmware-usbarbitrator64.exe services (VMware Worstation Server and VMware USB Arbitration Service respectively to Manual or Disabled in services.msc, leaving only vmware-authd.exe running all the time when I'm not using VMware to actually run a virtual machine.
With the current VMware 15.5 Workstation version, on my Win 10 system, I find these services all still start despite being Disabled. Why?
What can I do to see to it they do not start unless I'm actually using VMware?
And please, before answering "Why do you want to change this? Just accept it as it is and relax.", please undersdtand that I have been minimizing the footprint of applications on my computer systems since long before Microsoft was even a glimmer in Bill Gates' eye and no one even imagined virtual machines. I prefer to minimize the footprint of whatever I have installed on my systems so that it only uses resources when I'm using it. I have very fast I/O subsystems and fast processors with big RAM, and I want ALL of that available for the work I choose to be doing at the time. What I don't want is stuff that just hangs around consuming resources - however small a percentage - just in case I happen to run something. Starting the services takes no noticeable time. Thank god te era of spinning disk drives is over (I've been using SSDs and flash memory since 2012).
Ideally I would prefer to be able to configure things so that NO VMware software is running until such time as I need to start up one or more VMs for actual use. So please imagine that this question is extended to vmware-authd.exe as well. I was willing to live with just that one running, but now I think for the interim until I hear back here I'll go write a script that kills them all upon exit of VMware.exe. I have done this with other software that chooses not to offer the ability to have any run-time footprint while not being used.
Thanks.
-Noel
