At some point in installing and/or upgrading the latest version of VMware Player I seem to have borked my preferences. On each startup a virtual machine I would be forced to agree to the terms of service (which I had done before), and I would receive a couple of error messages complaining about “Unable to read user preferences.” and a missing preferences.ini file. Once past all the dialogs and errors everything seemed to work fine, but this happened every time I started VMware Player… so it quickly got annoying.
In the error dialog it gave me a path to the file that it was having trouble with “C:\Documents and Settings\Ben\Application Data\VMware\preferences.ini”. Looking at the file in question, I noticed it was empty, 0 bytes. So I uninstalled VMware Player, deleted the WMware directory under Application Data, and reinstalled WMware Player. Upon the first startup of VMware player, the preferences.ini was recreated with the correct data and everything worked fine and dandy.
