vmware-vmx 100% CPU time - need help

Hi all,

since I'm not getting anywhere with VMware technical support I hope anyone here can help me with this problem.

Brief summary (my support request to VMware actually) and what support and me have done so far.

All my VMs are almost non responsive and vmware-vmx (or vmware-vmx-debug when debug logging is enabled) is running at

100% CPU. My VMs are Windows 7 (32+64bit), XP, Windows 2000, 98, 98SE, ME, OS X 10.6 Server.My system iMac 2011, 3.4 GHz, Core i7, 16GB RAM, 2TB Hitachie HD (No SSD), AMD Radeon HD6970M 2048MB.

The problem is that I cannot run ANY VM at the moment. As soon as I start any of my virtual machines

the root process vmware-vmx is taking up 100% CPU time and the VM is unresponsive. I haven't been able

to start my Windows XP VM because it is soooooo slow that even after 5 minutes it hasn't started.When I start a suspended VM it is very unresponsive. A mouse click will register after minutes.

A debug log of my XP machine while trying to start up (I had suspended the start up before because it didn't go through)

http://pastebin.com/BCsT5Ssz

I also tried the safe boot method from the KB at http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1004017Unfortunately this information is outdated or might be part of my problem. When I try to run a VM in Fusion 4.1.1 in safe mode I get the error message "could not open /dev/vmmon: No such file or directoryPlease make sure that the kernel module 'vmmon' is loaded."

Trying to be clever by mentioning that I tried debug logging only lead to support first concentrating on this

Anyway I was then asked to send the "support information collection" and then to uninstall and reinstall Fusion as per

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1014529

Then got rid of Sophos AntiVirus and followed http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1027674 and then the more in depth

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1022625 :

Within Mac OS:

- as I previously wrote, I uninstalled my AV

- excluded from Time machine backups

- no disk encryption

- through disk utility ensured that my hard drive is ok

in Fusion:

- Removed snapshots (there weren't any)

- used pre-allocated/non-growable vd

- copied the VM to my USB drive

- edited the vm I/O usage settings

Within the virtual machine:

- did nothing as I don't have 30 hours time to let the VM boot and slowly doing stuff...

At the hardware level:

nothing to be done here.

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And that's what has been happening since January 30th (with me being a week away on holidays). Not to mention that some mails of mine seemed to have disappeared even though I didn't chnage anything in the subject except for the "Re:".

Anyone have more ideas?

The only deeper change I remember since the last time my VMs were working is that I installed Logitech Control Center 3.51 http://www.logitech.com/en-us/434/8424?softwareid=659&osid=&section=downloads for my Logitech K750 keyboard (so that the F-keys behave like F-keys). Uninstalling that didn't help though

Curios is still that running a VM in safebooted OS X didn't work. Maybe part of the problem, but technical support didn't look into that.