I upgraded from a working installation of VMWare 6.0.5 to VMWare 7 (basic). The installation seemed to go well at first, although my MacBook Pro 17 (8GB 2.8 GHz Intel Core Duo: OS X 10.9.5) initially crashed after launching the VMware window.
On restarting the Mac, the VMWare window launched successfully, and the Windows 7 Ultimate (SP1) opened. However, immediately on opening I was prompted to "Upgrade this Virtual Machine" and I (foolishly) clicked yes. Again, this seemed to work and I proceeded to work on a my tasks.
Before shutting down the VM, I attempted to update the VM Tools and this seems to be where my troubles start. The installer launched and tried to do the installation, however after displaying several progress bars, it began to report "rolling back action" and finally terminated with a dialog that said the VM Tools installation was incomplete. (I believe the MacBook crashed at this point.)
Subsequently, I can get VMWare 7.0 to reopen, but when I try to launch the Windows 7 VM, the MacBook crashes. I have tried to uninstall/reinstall the VMWare executable (VMware-Fusion-7.0.1-2235595.dmg) but I have the same problem when I try to open the Windows 7 VM that is, the MacBook crashes. Since all of this was working in VMWare 6, I suspect that something went awry either when I updated the Virtual Machine, or the VM definition (not sure what the correct term would be) was trashed by the incomplete installation of the VM Tools. Since the "Upgrade this Virtual Machine" dialog said I could no longer use the VM with earlier versions of VMWare, I can't rollback to VMWare 6 and just accept that the VMWare 7 episode is a $50 loss - also I couldn't upgrade the MacBook to OS X 10.10 but I could live with that for now.
I have a Time Machine backup that predates this whole episode, and possibly I could roll back to that, but I'm a bit afraid of doing that; about a year back I had to replace my MacBook hard drive, and the only program I wasn't able to restore from Time Machine was VMWare.
I think if I could get back to the point just after my install, when I was first asked to "Upgrade this Virtual Machine" and skipped that step, I suspect my world would be restored.
If you need me to forward logging information let me know (and where I can expect to find the information)
Thanks for your help...
