VMware image customization in progress issue

I just came across this very annoying VMware guest customization artifact. I neglected to update the sysprep directories at

C:\<ALLUSERSPROFILE>\Application Data\Vmware\VMware VirtualCenter\sysprep

with a current version and it resulted in a failed image customization that would not go away. On each system restart a boot time run of sysprepDecrypter.exe would occur and cause a continual loop of execution on every boot.

To correct the issue I removed the sysprepDecryptor.exe registry entry from the session manger key rebooted and it ran for the last time. I manually ran sysprep afterwards to ensure that the SUID was unique.

Here is the location to delete the sysprepDecryptor.exe registry entry.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\

Value name = BootExecute

Default Value =  autocheck autochk *

  • Share/Save/Bookmark

Tags: , , , ,

Site Contents: © 2008  Mike La Spina

2 Comments

  • Glen says:

    Thank you for sharing this post. I had the same issue. This helped me out and I appreciate it.

  • Martin says:

    Thanks for sharing this! Always nice to “find the needle in the haystack!”

Leave a Reply

XHTML: You can use these tags:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>