Bug: selecting Shut Down Guest on NT4 breaks Workstation 9 GUI

[ender_]

Windows NT 4 can't power off automatically, instead showing a dialog telling you that it's safe to power off. If you select VM > Power > Shut Down Guest, VMWare will initiate the shutdown sequence, and disable the controls. However, since the virtual machine never powers off, the GUI stays stuck like this, and you have to kill vmware-vmx.exe to get the UI controls back.

Here's a demonstration of the problem:

[dariusd]

Hi ender`,

I can easily reproduce that issue here... I've filed an internal bug report so that we can try to figure out what's going on.  I think NT4 is the only guest OS which is capable enough to handle VMware Tools' soft power operations but incapable of powering itself off...  That interesting combination seems to be the crux of the problem.

Sorry for the hassle, and thanks for letting us know!

Thanks,

--

Darius

[dariusd]

Hi again, ender`!

Thanks for your detailed description of the problem.

As a workaround/improvement, you might also want to check out:

I haven't tried it myself, but it looks like those instructions would make this problem go away by configuring the VM to automatically power itself off instead of halting at the "safe to power off your computer" screen.  That should make it behave more like any other modern guest OS which knows how to power the system off.

There's definitely still a bug in Workstation, given the symptoms that you have reported, and we'll continue to investigate it, but hopefully the instructions in that document can help you along until a fix is available.

Cheers,

--

Darius

[ender_]

I normally shut down the VM through Start > Shut down, which doesn't affect the VMWare GUI (lets me power it off through the menu), I just stumbled on this by accident.

Thanks for the link though, I'll set that up in the VM.

[ender_]

I used the workaround from that article, but it only works when you select Start > Shutdown - if you use VMWare's "Shut Down Guest" command instead, the VM doesn't power off.

[dariusd]

Hmmmm... That's very odd.  Oh well, it was worth a try.

From your earlier post, it sounds like you're OK with continuing to shut down the VM from within the guest, and simply avoiding the VM > Power > Shut Down Guest option for now... We'll continue to investigate the cause and should be able to fix it in due course.

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Darius