Workstation 14.1.7 won't autostart VMUSBArbService

[gbohn]

Hi;

  I was running VMWare workstation 14.1.7 fine on a Windows 10 1803 host. The system updated itself to Windows 10 1809, and now every time I boot I see two failures in the host Event Viewer. Event ID's 7023 and 7001:

"The VMUSBArbService service terminated with the following error:

The system cannot find the file specified."

and

"The VMwareHostd service depends on the VMUSBArbService service which failed to start because of the following error:

The system cannot find the file specified"

Curiously, even though it won't auto-start at boot, if I go to services and hit 'start', the VMUSBArbService service seems to start o.k. and stay running.

I tried a 'Repair' installation with no improvement. I then tried uninstalling and reinstalling Workstation using the 'save' option for license, etc. (I had to use the 'old' version of add/remove programs  because the 'new' Windows 10 Add/remove programs entry for Workstation had 'un-install' greyed out).

That also doesn't seem to have helped.

Any suggestions? Do I need to restore the 1803 from backup and try removing Workstation before upgrading to Windows 10 1809? Any way to fix this otherwise?

Thanks;

[gbohn]

I tried many things without success. I eventually found a work-around though.

Some of the things that didn't work:

*) I restored the Host Windows 10 back to 1803, removed Workstation, updated to 1809, re-installed workstation.

*) Various flavors of installing with '/clean' or '/r'. Various 'repair installation' attempts.

*) Manually deleting registry keys and vmware directories on C: between re-installs.

*) Installing Workstation 15.1

At least for the moment, it appears that changing the services

       'VMWare USB Arbitration Service'

and 'VMWare Workstation server'

from starting as 'Automatic' to 'Automatic (Delayed start)' seems to prevent the Event logs. And, the arbitration service now auto starts (after a few minutes anyway...)

I don't have any antivirus other than the built-in Windows Defender. So why I am seeing a 'File not found' error when the file seems to clearly exist is not obvious to me (when using regular auto-start). And, things previously seemed to be working fine at Windows 10 1803 (before it updated to 1809). Maybe a timing issue.

I tried this work-around thanks to the similar sounding topic (for Workstation 15) at VMware Workstation 15.0.3 USB Arbitration Service Won't Start Automatically .