I've encountered the same error as described here and here. After a fair bit of wrangling with it and researching, I've narrowed the problem down to the installation of the Bridged Network Protocol driver, and I can reproduce it by attempting to install manually. [ Control Panel > Network and Sharing Center > Change Adapter Settings > Properties > Networking Tab > Install ... > Service > Add .. > Have Disk ... > VMware Workstation\netbridge.inf > Open ] The previous topic concluded that this was a rare bug, and a report had been opened. Has there been any progress on this? I'd prefer not to rebuild my workstation just to fix this.
I found the following in the system event log, source UserPnp, an event that may be relevant, containing an error code:
Driver Management concluded the process to install driver FileRepository\netadapter.inf_amd64_neutral_016f36b04570fa43\netadapter.inf for Device Instance ID ROOT\VMWARE\0000 with the following status: 0x5b3.
The error code, when looked up, is ERROR_REQUIRES_INTERACTIVE_WINDOWSTATION, and I see a few references to it causing failure of installation of other drivers as well in search results. I'm willing to assist in researching the error further if anyone can come up with something to check. (It seems to be a difficult error to reproduce on machines that aren't already encountering it.)
Background:
I encountered the error while upgrading from VMWare Player to VMWare Workstation. I have tried (or found irrelevant) most of the troubleshooting proposed in the linked discussion topic above. I'm running Windows 7 Professional SP1 (64-bit), and VMWare Workstation 9.0.1 build-894247, licensed.
Edit: Updated to include the *other* discussion I was referencing and meant to link.