A Glitch with Uninstalling VMWare Server
Posted on April 5th, 2006
I wanted to uninstall VMWare Server the other day from a Windows machine. But the uninstall seemed to keep crapping out. It would go so far, and then just... sit there.
When you uninstall VMWare Server, there are at least two points when a window will pop up asking for your yes-or-no confirmation. The first is whether your licence information should be left behind in case you want to reinstall at some point in the future. It was shortly after this that the uninstall appeared to hang.
The second confirmation has something to do with the user accounts that virtual machines run under. I don't remember exactly, but I think the gist of it had something to do with whether this information should be left behind or not. I happened to have been using the VMWare Console through a Terminal Services session, and had gotten warnings about how the virtual machine would terminate when my session ended unless I set it to run under a specific account.
The trouble was that this second confirmation window didn't get focus during the uninstall. It was buried beneath the Add/Remove Programs window, and I only discovered it by accident. All this time, the uninstall was just waiting on that final confirmation and as soon as I gave it, the process finished normally and all was well with the world.