VMWare Workstation 15 VMs Now No Longer Start

[Dryne]

For reasons unknown to me, I can no longer start any virtual machine.  I just noticed this issue today, and everything was working fine just yesterday.  When I attempt to start one, I see the message I have attached.  There have been no hardware changes, and my BIOS settings have virtualization still enabled (I just checked this).  My host OS is Windows 10 Professional.  Does anyone have ideas of what is suddenly wrong and how to fix?  Hyper-V is still not installed (I checked this too).

[Dryne]

I just started my Ubuntu VM, and this one started successfully.  My Windows XP VM also started without issue.  I cannot start my Windows 10 Professional VM or my Windows 7 Professional VM.

Attached are the two log files for the two VMs that do not start.

[Dryne]

When I last started both of these VMs, I ran Windows update.  I am now backing up the Windows 7 VM files to restore from an older backup.  I will report back once this is complete on whether or not it starts.  It could be that Windows update caused this issue for both.

[Dryne]

I restored a known good backup of my Windows 7 VM from the end of January.  It fails to start with the same error message.  I guess this could be due to a host OS update, but I am still not sure what the problem is.

[Dryne · Accepted solution]

I discovered the cause.  It was not due to any Windows updates.  The issue was due to the installation of Dell Precision Optimizer Application I had installed today.  I uninstalled this, and both Windows 7 and Windows 10 VMs start again.