Blackmoor Vituperative

I ran into a problem with VMWare Server 2.0 the other day. I have VMWare set up to start the virtual machines when machine starts. This is a Windows XP Pro machine (the final version of Windows, as far as I am concerned). From looking at the event log, it appeared that the virtual machines would not start because the VMWare Host Agent service was not starting, and the VMWare Host Agent service was not starting because it had several dependencies which were not yet started themselves when the VMWare Host Agent service was being kicked off by Windows.

I did quite a bit of research on this, and tried some very clever solutions, none of which made any difference (changing the service’s dependencies, etc.). What I finally did was to create a small batch file, vmware_host_agent.bat

:: pause sixty seconds, then start VMWare

ping 127.0.0.1 -n 60 >nul

net start “VMWare Host Agent” -x

And then created a link to that in the Startup group.

Problem solved. It’s not elegant, but it works.