I have windows vista home premium on my laptop. One day suddenly my VMWare started giving error "the vmware authorization service is not running " while starting virtual machine. I googled on internet & found KB Item on VMWare site    http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1007131

It said, go to compute management & give admin rights to VMWare user & then reinstall the VMWare . Looks easy.  I started following steps . But wait.. where is familiar screen of user management.  Windows Vista Home Premium do not have provision to use GUI user management consol. Thats not fair !!

Google one more time & here you go. http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/itprovistasecurity/thread/e3d50d7f-deba-4a79-b347-72ed3d14d940 

Lot of good information is mention on this thread about user management using command line. Use below command to list users on computer & get exact name of VMWareUser

> NET USERS  

Syntax for adding for adding or removing user from group is

NET LOCALGROUP <<groupname>> <<user name>> {/ADD | /DELETE}

So below command should give admin right to VMWare user

>NET LOCALGROUP Administrators __vmware_user__ /add

But Ooops !! Got an error.

System error 5 has occurred.

Access is denied.

I am logged in as admin user still why would I get this error ?  Okey.. this is access error so my command line console is not having enough rights . Thanks to Windows Vista's User Account Control

Now right click on Command Prompt Menu & Run it as an Administrator. Now I was able to add VMWare user to administrators group from command line.  I have not yet reinstalled the VMware but I am still getting the same error. "the vmware authorization service is not running ". To to try something more , I right clicked VMWare Workstation & Ran it as administrator. I was able to start my workstation .

:) that was simple ..