How to Remove VMWare Tools in Case it Starts Behaving Funny

Introduction

Today, a virtual machine refused to enter Unity mode because the VMWARE TOOLS were not up to date... updating the VMWARE TOOLS from the usual menu ended up in a message telling that the installation had finished before its end and performed a rollback.

The same happened when I tried to uninstall VMWARE TOOLS from the control panel uninstall program option.

Steps

Backups are your friends.

Start the VM and once Windows is running, delete manually the folders:

C:\Program Files\VMware
C:\Program Files\Common Files\VMware
C:\Program Data\VMware
C:\users\username\App data\VMware

Start regedit, go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\ and delete the keys and folders with the following names:

vmci
vm3dmp
vmaudio
vmhgfs
vmmemctl
vmmouse
VMRawDisk
VMTools
vmusbmouse
vmvss
vmware physical disk helper services
VMwareCAF* 

Also, remove HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\VMware.Inc.

Restart the virtual machine.

Try to install VMWare tools normally.

That just worked in my computer, VMWARE TOOLS just installed properly.

History

• 2^nd March, 2023: Initial version