VMWare Workstation Pro BSOD On Install Win11 23H2

[Jacob Lauterbach]

Hello,

I am having issues installing VMware Workstation on my Dell Precision 7680 laptop. I had Workstation Pro 17.6.2 installed previously on my laptop, and was working just fine.

I then started having seemingly random BSODs without even launching Workstation Pro, and it seemed like the "hcmon.sys" driver was the cause. I deleted hcmon.sys, and the BSODs stopped, but I obviously could not use Workstation Pro anymore. I attempted re-installing, and this was the first time I encountered the issue I have now, where I get a BSOD listing "system_thread_exception_not_handled" listing the same "hcmon.sys" as the cause again.

I do not have Splashtop installed (as I've seen elsewhere in these forums), I tried doing a clean uninstall in RegEdit.exe and deleting all related files, including hcmon.sys, and nothing allows me to successfully install Workstation Pro. I even tried other versions, such as 17.6.4 and 17.5.2 and both encountered the same issue.

I can attach a screenshot of my system information screen on my laptop, and attached the latest minidump file. If any more information is required, I'd be happy to provide it.

[Prajakta Malla]

Hi Jacob

We investigated the dump file but were unable to find definitive information. Please perform a registry cleanup, restart your system, and then attempt a fresh installation. For your reference, Workstation 25H2u1 is the latest version available. 

Regards

[RaSystemlord]

Jacob, don't know what this is about, but once I contacted Dell Support for kind of a similar problem. Their FIRST suggestion was to remove their own programs from the system - they might be interfering with everything like this.

[RaSystemlord]

There is also another possibility, if this is a corporate laptop. You might have some 3rd Party software running there, which blocks unknown programs - this is a possibility because you had problems with that file also before. The thing is that "normal administrators" and even less users, they don't "need to know", what is running on their laptops - for anticipated security reasons. So, you might not know what is running on your laptop. Not to get information on the reason of "not working", might be by design of this security program.

[Jacob Lauterbach]

Prajakta, I can try that this morning, I believe I had tried a 25H2 version of Workstation Pro as well to no avail, but I can give it another try.

RaSystemlord, I thought the same thing, but there are at least 3 other people on my team with the exact same laptop as mine that run this software no problem. So I hesitate to blame anything corporate IT is putting on my laptop as I would expect it would cause them issues as well.

I did forget to add that this issue seems to have started after doing a test using Hyper-V on my laptop. I did a head to head comparison to see which platform my team wanted to use moving forward, and after we decided to stick with VMware, I attempted to uninstall Hyper-V completely (easier said than done) and most of my VMware issues started after this.