vmware-vmx.exe hangs, can't kill, won't release memory

[garyfritz]

I've recently been using Workstation for the first time in a while.  I've had several occasions where a VM doesn't shut down properly.  vmware-vmx.exe keeps running, and I can't kill it with Task Manager or pskill.exe.  Sometimes the process will very slowly (like over several hours or even days) reduce its memory usage according to Task Manager, but the memory never gets freed (Task Manager's Physical Memory Usage History doesn't drop), and the task never dies.  I can't run another VM because I'm out of memory, and the only way I've found to get rid of the zombie vmware-vmx.exe is to reboot my system.

This happened several times when I powered off a VM (because I realized I'd messed something up in the OS install, so I didn't worry about shutting it down cleanly).  It just happened again when I tried to cleanly shut down a VM.  It was a W2008 R2 VM, and I'd just had a failure installing Exchange on it.  I only had 512MB in the VM, and I wondered if that was the problem, so I was going to shut it down and increase it to 1GB RAM.  But it never finished shutting down.  The console is black, the VM icon in the Favorites list still shows a green "Running" arrow, and all the power on / power off / etc selections are grayed out.

What is causing this, how can I avoid it, and how can I kill this process without rebooting my system??

Running Workstation 6.5.5 on Vista Home Premium.

Thanks,

Gary        

[garyfritz]

Anyone?  Anyone??

I've moved from a Vista host to a Win7 Home Premium host, and I'm still hitting this same problem.  Right now I need to reboot my system because vmware-vmx.exe is hosed.  At least with my new Win7 system I have enough memory to tolerate a hung-up VM or two, but I *need* the one that's hung!!

Any guesses how to avoid this, or at least how to kill the process when it's hung?  (Short of rebooting the whole system!)

[garyfritz]

Please, people.  Surely SOMEbody has encountered this, or has SOME idea how to avoid it or deal with it when it happens???

[continuum]

you can NOT kill vmware-vmx.exe with taskmanager ???

thats unexpected - can you attach the vmware.log when that happens again ?

[garyfritz]

That is correct.  I tried with Task Manager, procexp.exe, etc -- no  joy.  The process will not die, will not go away.  In some cases it  veeerrrrry slowly (over many hours) reduced its memory usage, according  to its entry in Task Manager, but Task Manager said the overall memory  usage never reduced.

Unfortunately in the month since I asked my question, I finished the project I was working on.  I haven't been using VMware as much so I haven't run into it recently.  I have logs from all the VMs I was working on, but I don't remember which one(s) hung.  I'll see if I can duplicate the behavior, and if so I'll post the log.         

[ramail2512]

i know this was almost 6 year ago, but it started happening to me about a month ago.  i use wm workstation pro 12.  running an ubuntu guest.  log are not showing any problems, but i can't shut down the guest.  any recent solutions to this?

"I tried with Task Manager, procexp.exe, etc -- no  joy.  The process will not die, will not go away.  In some cases it  veeerrrrry slowly (over many hours) reduced its memory usage, according  to its entry in Task Manager, but Task Manager said the overall memory  usage never reduced."