I'm new to VMware, so please forgive me if I am asking anything extremely dumb...
I installed Vmware workstation 6.5.3 under XP PRO SP3, created several guests also running XPRO. Originally I was using the guests as "NAT" based networking option but then switched them to "host" based as I did not need them to be able to reach outside the host for anything further in what I was doing.
I completed the work I needed to do and hoped to revisit VMware another time as future projects may require. However then the next day my PC started having severe network problems. As part of troubleshooting that I saw that even though I was not running VMware anymore, that a process called "vmware-authd.exe" was showing up in a utility called TCPVIEW that lets me view all connections on the PC. The process was "listening" on port 912 locally trying to connect to my same machine on port 0.
I terminated that process with TCPVIEW and my network problems went away. Digging further I saw that VMware has 4 services defined under XP - 3 of which are started automatically and always running (VMware NAT service, VMware Authorization service, VMware DHCP service) and 1 that is set to manual startup (VMware agent service). To be safe until I understand more and further troubleshoot the network problem I disabled all 4 of the services.
At this point I don't believe that VMWare was the source of the problem though since then later on the networking issues returned. However I'd like to understand more what those VMWare services do under XP and why I might want to leave them at their default settings of "automatic" and running all the time even if I am no longer running the software - and would also like to know what that process was doing via TCP listening for something (???). I see that same kind of behavior for some anti-virus scanners that are active all the time but wasn't expecting behavior like that from something like VMware (if it is not actually running).
THANKS a ton for any explanations.
