How to Manually Remove VMware Tools

June 5th, 2009

Kiwi Si

Ever had the problem where you either have a corrupt copy of VMware Tools that can’t be updated or you perform an update and the install fails part way through leaving remnants behind? These remnants then stop you from reinstalling VMware Tools and you are presented with the following error messages:

$Error 1316 A network error occured while attempting to read from the file C:\Windows\Installed\VMware Tools.msi$

Even an uninstall doesn’t always work so unfortunately you’ll have to revert to to manually removing the items from the registry and file system that are stopping a new install from taking place.

The process to resolve this is simple and the following has been taken from VMware’s Knowledge Base article here. I found that performing these steps helped resolve this problem for me.

Open the Windows Registry editor. Click Start > Run.

Type regedit press Enter.

Browse to HKLM \Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\uninstall. Search for the branch with a key named DisplayName and has a value of VMware Tools . Delete the branch associated with that entry. Do not delete the entire uninstall branch.

Browse to HKLM\Software\Classes\Installer\Products . Search for the branch with the key named ProductName and has a value of VMware Tools . Delete the branch associated with that entry.

Browse to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Installer\Products . Search for the branch with the key named ProductName and has a value of VMware Tools . Delete the branch associated with that entry.

Browse to HKLM \Software\VMware. Delete the branch called VMware Tools .

Ensure the folder located in %ProgramFiles%\VMware\VMware Tools is deleted.

Attempt to install the new version of VMware Tools, if applicable

In the future I might look at generating a script to perform this for me though it happens so rarely I haven’t felt the need up to now. Let me know if you’d find a script useful.