There is a registry setting in Windows that tells the heap to allocate from the top down (i.e., large addresses first). This is used for debugging 64-bit (and 32-bit "large address aware") applications by forcing them to get pointers that don't fit in 32 bits. When I turn that on in my Vista 64 virtual machine with the latest VMWare Tools on Workstation 7 (8.1.3 build 203739) the VMWare Tools service crashes. I have attached a zip containing the generated minidump. It looks like a pointer got truncated and then sign-extended, and the crash happens when dereferencing the resulting bad address.
This worked with older VMWare tools, so I'll try to see if I can downgrade. Otherwise it's preventing me from getting work done (trying to reproduce similar issues in my own product).
