This problem cropped up today, after updating my eVGA motherboard's chipset in order to try and fix an unrelated issue. After installing the chipset update (contained SATA and Ethernet drivers), every time I've tried to start my Ubuntu VM, it reaches 95% in the web interface and then just hangs.
I'm using VMWare Server 2.0.2, running it within Windows 7 64-bit. I haven't had any issues up until now, and I suspect it has something to do with the chipset update. I've already tried reinstalling VMWare itself, removing the VM from the inventory and re-adding it, and neither has proved successful. I'm also not sure how to kill the VMware server process itself once the start-up hangs; I've only been able to try again by rebooting (as none of the VMWare Services listed kill the server process itself).
Any insights?
Edit: Uhhh…as an addendum: I have a cron job set up on my Ubuntu VM that runs every 20 minutes. The VM is still listed in the VMWare web interface as at 95% of startup, and the start/stop buttons are still disabled, but the cronjob just ran. I also tested SSH, and I was able to tunnel into the Ubuntu VM as well. Now I'm really confused.
Edit #2: I just started a thread on the VMWare Server support forums on this same topic. Hopefully between the two communities, we can come up with an answer:
http://communities.vmware.com/thread/251033
Edit #3: In lieu of a specific fix, I've switched over to VirtualBox, and all is working just fine.
Best Answer
I've tried your suggestion about switching browsers and am now using Firefox 3.5.6 instead of 64bit IE8, there is an improvement is the consistency of the Tomcat based Web Access (so I'm going to stick with using Firefox for this app) but there's no improvement with the problem. Even creating NEW VM's hang at 95%!
There seems to be a little more info. on the VMWARE forums, this appears to of happened before with 64bit Vista...