Ubuntu Guest intermittently hangs on "Restart Guest"

[Dan Handalian]

Environment

Host: Windows 11 Pro, 64-gig RAM, plenty of HD space

Guest: Ubuntu 24 (also happened with 22)

Program: VMWare Workstation Pro 17.6.1; have also seen the problem with Workstation 16.2.5 and 17.0.2

Note: VMWare runs on one SSD; guest OS's are saved on a different SSD.  Neither SSD causes any regular problems with any other program.

Problem

Intermittently, since I've been using VMWare (~2 years), I have had the following problem:

1. End of day, I suspend the guest OS
2. Next day, click Resume
3. Guest appears to resume OK, but it is completely hung up.  Cannot click into it nor interact with it at all.
4. Force shutdown guest via VMWare Play/Pause menu.
5. Start guest & log in

RESULT: guest can operate, but my software development environment is corrupted.  git gives errors when trying to perform basic operations.  Need to completely rebuild my dev env.  Obviously, very frustrating and a time-sink.

FREQUENCY: previously this happened less often, but since upgrading to 17.6 it happens about once every 2 weeks.  (I use this guest 5-6 days a week for work).

RELATED?  Sometimes for step 3, instead of what I wrote above, I get a message that says "A fault has occurred causing a virtual CPU to enter the shutdown state...  Click OK to restart the vm or Cancel to power off"

What hasn't worked?

-changing the guest OS.  I got this with Ubuntu 22. Recently, we switched to Ubuntu 24.  I created an entirely new vm and new OS. Still having the problem.

-changing the host.  As I wrote above, I've seen this with 3 different VMWare Workstation Pro releases.

-once / week I completely shut down the guest (normal Ubuntu shutdown procedure) instead of suspending it. Was hoping that would prevent the problem; it has not.

Any help appreciated.  I'm pretty close to giving up on VMWare because of this.

[RaSystemlord]

How carefully have you tested the reliable procedure - to shutdown the Guest after use? Also, are you sure that there is nothing wrong in saving your work on Ubuntu - I mean, is this Ubuntu software related?

It's hard to see a problem with saved files getting corrupted or gone missing in an ordinary shutdown of the guest.

[Dan Handalian]

Thanks, @RaSystemlord.  That does make sense.  I was trying to avoid fully shutting down & booting up every day, just because of time.  I have a few colleagues who regularly use the Suspend feature and don't have the problem I have, so it seemed like a viable approach.  Maybe I'll try it for a bit just to test.