@orthonin, you're a life-saver!
I followed the exact same steps as you indicated, with two minor changes, to resolve Exception 0xc0000005 (access violation) in a Windows 10 VM guest running on a VMware Fusion 11.5.1 host on a MacOS Catalina machine in January of 2020:
- I found no VMware services running in your step 2, as nothing from earlier VMware tools installations was running in my guest VM, so I replaced your step 2 with a reboot
- Again, as no VMware services were running in my guest VM, I was able to delete all files in step 4, so I did not need to repeat that step after a reboot
Steps I followed:
1. uninstall vmware tools from control panel;
2. reboot
3. delete install directory, eg. c:\Program Files\Vmware;
4. open c:\windows\system32, delete all files of vmware, (every vm* that showed "VMware" as the publisher on mouse-over). All file deletion attempts succeeded in my case, making your step #6 unnecessary for me.
5. reboot system;
6. copy all files from vmware tools' install cd to c:\temp, click setup.exe(setup64 for x64) to install.
7. reboot. the problem has been solved.
Upon final reboot, I found my friendly VM icon in the system tray and knew I'd overcome the "access violation."
Thank you so much, Milton, for taking the time to share what worked for you! I'd spent hours across several days, chasing VMware.log files I couldn't find, running vm-support.vbs scripts that seemingly ran forever and never reported the directory where they dropped their output and trying to decipher tips in other threads that lead to blind alleys.
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