VMware Authorization Service is not running – after Windows 7 Upgrade

We ran into this in our office and we have a workaround.

Issue:

After upgrading from Vista to Windows 7, our VMware Workstation (and VMware Player) installs no longer functioned properly. When we would go to start our virtual machines, we would get The VMware Authorization Service is not running” and when attempting to start the service, it was set to Automatic but all functionality was grayed out (unavailable to start).

The Fix:

Uninstalling VMware Workstation was not enough. Remnants were kicking around. So, on top of uninstalling VMware Workstation, you’ll also want to do the following…

To force an uninstall of VMware Workstation (or any VMware Product) open a command shell where your VMware install exe is and run it like the example:

E.G: VMware-workstation-6.X.X-XXXX.exe /C

(Where the key item here is /C to force a VMware cleanup)