Yesterday one of my VMs crashed when I tried to suspend it and it lead to quite unpleasant situation: all options for VMs (Start/Stop, Snapshot) become unavailable. So that context menu for VM looks something like this:
I erroneously focused my troubleshooting and googling efforts around one VM issue, and not immediately realized that options were unavailable for all VMs… Consequently wasted quite a bit of time before I was able to resolve this. Jotting down the solution to avoid this in the future.
Problem: After VMware Workstation crash all options for all VMs are greyed our.
Solution: delete contents of %appdata%\VMware folder (2 files – preferences.ini & inventory.vlms)
It will be necessary to re-add your VMs to the list but this should not be a big problem.
* Common sense rule of backing up whatever you delete during your troubleshooting efforts is applicable here as usual
