Exeunt VMware Tools

In my experience the VMware Tools installers will work only when run on VMware VMs and crash immediately (with error 0xC0000096, STATUS_PRIVILEGED_INSTRUCTION) everywhere else. This is a problem when you move a VM to another platform and either forget to uninstall the tools first, or are reluctant to lose the VMXNET drivers.

There are various sets of instructions on the Internet on how to uninstall VMware Tools using other means than the regular uninstallation, but I have found they either do not work, or are hopelessly difficult to follow. (The latter is not something that should stop you, of course.)

So here is my own hopelessly difficult to follow set of instructions:

1. Get a current VMware Tools installer from VMware.
2. Create an AIP from it (VMware-tools-....exe /a).
3. Use Orca or another MSI editor to remove the VM_LogStart and VM_LogEnd_Def actions from the InstallExecuteSequence and InstallUISequence tables in the .msi file.
4. Run msiexec /l*v msi.log /x <.msi file>. It will exit immediately, and the log will show that the custom action you just removed was magically run nonetheless.
5. Look for “Package we’re running from” in the log file. This will show a path in C:\WINDOWS\Installer, and it means that because the product is already installed, msiexec used the cached package instead of the one you gave it.
6. Rename that cached package to get it out of the way.
7. Re-run the uninstallation.

This should work. If not, start over.