VMware TCP port listening & services running under XP Pro

[elzar]

I'm new to VMware, so please forgive me if I am asking anything extremely dumb...

I installed Vmware workstation 6.5.3 under XP PRO SP3, created several guests also running XPRO. Originally I was using the guests as "NAT" based networking option but then switched them to "host" based as I did not need them to be able to reach outside the host for anything further in what I was doing.

I completed the work I needed to do and hoped to revisit VMware another time as future projects may require. However then the next day my PC started having severe network problems. As part of troubleshooting that I saw that even though I was not running VMware anymore, that a process called "vmware-authd.exe" was showing up in a utility called TCPVIEW that lets me view all connections on the PC. The process was "listening" on port 912 locally trying to connect to my same machine on port 0.

I terminated that process with TCPVIEW and my network problems went away. Digging further I saw that VMware has 4 services defined under XP - 3 of which are started automatically and always running (VMware NAT service, VMware Authorization service, VMware DHCP service) and 1 that is set to manual startup (VMware agent service). To be safe until I understand more and further troubleshoot the network problem I disabled all 4 of the services.

At this point I don't believe that VMWare was the source of the problem though since then later on the networking issues returned. However I'd like to understand more what those VMWare services do under XP and why I might want to leave them at their default settings of "automatic" and running all the time even if I am no longer running the software - and would also like to know what that process was doing via TCP listening for something (???). I see that same kind of behavior for some anti-virus scanners that are active all the time but wasn't expecting behavior like that from something like VMware (if it is not actually running).

THANKS a ton for any explanations.

[dtracey]

Hi Elzar,

vmnat.exe = VMware NAT Server, used by vmnet8 to provide NAT networking.

vmnetdhcp.exe = VMware DHCP Server, used by vmnet 1 & vmnet8 to provide DHCP service.

vmware-authd.exe = VMware Authorization Service, used to preform tasks when not using the Admin account.

Hope that clears things up.

Dan

[elzar]

Thanks for the reply Dan, but I'd really like to know about why the processes are running/started even when I'm not using the software (and things like are they impacting performance anywhere/should I just disable them like I did), but especially what

vmware-authd.exe is doing listening in TCP all the time.

[ogpimen]

- could you please elaborate? I see the same behavior in windows 10 - 2021 June 14th.

[Scott Vessey]

 

Rather than resurrecting a 12-year old thread, it is probably best to create your own, in the area of VMTN which relates to the VMware product you are using.