it is a real mess.
in short:
we were very happy with VMWP 4 for a long time.
unfortunately then I yielded to the temptation to upgrade for version 5.
the installation of VMWP 5.0 tried to uninstall the VMWP 4 first and failed with a confused error message.
after that nothing is working anymore: not the old program version 4, not the install of 4, not the deinstall of 4, not the cleaning of 4, not the install of 5 , not the deinstall of 5, not the cleaning of version 5 and not the manual cleaning of any version.
the error messages are perfectly free of any meaning.
i spent hours and hours with it and cannot find any working solution here in the forum or anywhere in the internet
in details:
* uninstalling from the control panel gave an error message and deleted the entry of VMWP
in the programs section at all.
* install VMware 4 with /clean finishes with okay (several times).
* install VMware 5 with /clean finishes with error
"Bad Arguments for CDeleteMSIInstallerKeysOperation::Execute:Invalid parameters" (several times)
* install VMware 4 asks for uninstalling the old version (it does not give a repair or a remove option)
and finishes the uninstall with
"Bad Arguments for :C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware Player\Uninstaller\uninstall.exe"
(this file does not exist, several times)
* install VMware 5 gives the same error (several times)
* proceeding following the site "Cleaning up after an incomplete deinstallation
on a Windows host" of the "vmware knowledge base"
is not possible because the mentioned registry keys do not exist:
AE11A35A5900F39468AF1AE5A8684A50
7A26F0EA2A1AF704F9C48439B99DDAD8
7A79579133DA8984D9E8376086814B46
{A53A11EA-0095-493F-86FA-A15E8A86A405}
3F935F414A4C79542AD9C8D157A3CC39
(all other steps but the registry cleaning have been executed properly)
I am begging for help.
Sam