VMware Fusion 7 Crashes on Startup

Today I discovered that Fusion may not start if you are behind an Internet proxy and Fusion is unable to check for updates, which is the default setting. Sadly, this took me about a half-hour to figure out, when I was trying to startup Fusion to get my work PC up and running. The Fusion window would start to appear and then just disappear. I deleted Fusion, re-installed it, but experienced the same results, because by default Fusion checks for updates upon starting up and I was behind an Internet proxy (corporate office). Being used to working remotely with no proxy involved, this made the situation very confusing, since when I typically go into the office, Fusion is already running.

To avoid this behavior, go to VMware Fusion > Preferences and un-check Automatically check for updates or get out from behind the internet proxy until Fusion has started.

I discovered the source of this issue in this post on the VMware Community forum.

VMware Fusion 7 Copy & Paste, Drag & Drop, and Unity Issue

I use a client's Windows 7 laptop as my work PC that I long ago P2V'd into a Parallels 8 VM. All was going right in the world when I decided that with the introduction of VMware Fusion 7 Pro's ability to access ESXi hosts, like the non-existant VMware client for MAC, this would be my new hypervisor of choice. I knew of Fusion's (or Windows 7) lack of USB 3.0 support, but I figured I could live without it as long I could copy & paste between guest and host. After a messy "import" of my Parallels VM to Fusion, I was able to finally sort everything out except the following:

• Copy & paste did not work
• Drag & drop did not work
• Unity was not working

After following the advice in KB1014988 and KB1027884, the issues still persisted and I finally opened a ticket with VMware. After spending a couple of hours on a WebEx with VMware support, they finally discovered a solution. User Account Control (UAC) was preventing this functionality. After dropping it to "Never notify" and rebooting, Unity was enabled and I was able to copy & paste and drag & drop between the guest and host.

You can perform this fix by going to Control Panel > User Accounts > Change User Account Control settings and setting the slider bar to the bottom setting of Never notify. After updating this setting, reboot for the change to take effect.

After the issue was resolved, and I had a better idea as to what was causing the issue, I came across KB1019058 which addresses the issue of Unity and UAC. I was also informed that Windows Firewall could also cause issues with Unity, but that was not my case.