Virtual works in WS 15.1 PRO but not in WS 16.1 PRO. Believe it to be Hardware Compatibility setting

[jdgange]

I have an older laptop (MS Surface) with WS Pro 15 installed. The virtual machine is Win XP using Hardware Compatibility 11.x.

My new PC (also MS Surface) is running WS Pro 16. I moved a copy of the XP virtual over to WS Pro 16 but had to change the Hardware Compatibility to 16.x to get it to boot. Before the change I'd get a "Failed to start the virtual machine" error. At first I didn't see this change being an issue since I could get into my XP environment and work. Recently I discovered that when I compiled an application I wrote in the WS Pro 16 XP environment that application would crash when executing it. I went back to my WS Pro 15 XP environment and compiled the same application and it executes just fine.

I've come to the conclusion that anything greater than Hardware Compatibility 11.x messes up the compiler (I'm using VB6 in XP for anyone curious).

I tried taking the WS Pro 16.x bootable virtual and using the Change Hardware Compatibility convert it down to 11.x but then I get the "Failed to start the virtual machine" error again. I also tried using the vCenter standalone to change the Hardware Compatibility but get the same error.

According to the documents I found, WS Pro 16.x is supposed to be able to use 11.x hardware virtuals. I have read everything I could find and tried everything I could think of but cannot get past this.

I'm hoping someone here has run into this and resolved it. I really need this XP environment to function on my current system.

Thanks!

[jdgange]

Yesterday I hit Software Update to see if there was a newer version of 16.1. A window popped up showing me v17. 

On another computer that's running 16.1, when I started VMWare, a window popped up asking if I wanted to update to 16.2.5. I went back to my production machine and hit Software Update again and was again showed the v17 window but this time when I closed the window another popup showed up offering me 16.2.5. 

After updating from 16.1 to 16.2.5, the problem of not being able to open my 11.x virtual disappeared!!. My compiled program in XP now works in WS 16 PRO.

[RDPetruska]

I had this issue with Workstation 16 (VM not starting) after my host OS updated from Win10 to Win11.  I did determine that Hardware Version 15 would work.  I have not tried my VB6 compiler on my WinXP VM, so can't answer that part yet.