Citrix Provisioning Services + VMware Tools upgrade: BSOD

When VMTools are upgraded/installed it sets the registry key:
HKLMSYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesvmxnet”START” to DWORD:00000003. By resetting this to its previous value of dword:00000000 (i.e. its value before the upgrade) it stopped the BSOD. You have to upgrade VMTools and make this change before restarting the machine.

Setting the START key to 3 will cause the system to not load the vmxnet driver until someone manually starts it, ie “net start vmxnet”. The value of 0 means that the driver will be loaded at system boot along with all the other boot mode drivers and is considered critical to the system booting successfully.

To set this registry key you can boot into “last known good configuration” with F8 during the startup of Windows.

Thanks to Charles Batchelor and Keith Pasquill in this thread.

Advertisement