I've always been impressed at how good folks are answering every possible sort of obscure question, so maybe somebody can help me sort this out.

On my old work machine, I was running Win2000 on the bare hardware, then VMware, version 2.something, then RedHat Linux 7.0 (with up-to-date security patches) as the guest operating system. I ran an X server on Windows, and it was quite sufficient to get my emacs and xterms displaying nicely. I loved it.

On my new work machine, I'm now running WinXP (professional, SP1) on the bare hardware and VMware, version 3.2.0, build 2230 (the latest version). I migrated my old Linux image over and everything worked great. Almost.

On my task manager, I see vmware-authd.exe chewing up between 5 and 19% of the CPU, non-stop. This also manifests itself with jerky mouse motion. I tried lowering the priority of the process, and it said "permission denied" (despite my having administrative privileges). I asked VMware to lower its priority via the 'Preferences' dialog, but the vmware-authd process is still running at "normal" priority.

I had originally configured VMware to try to keep the guest machine's clock in sync with the host machine. This resulted in vast quantities of log generation, e.g.:

Oct 29 12:03:32: VMX|Host_SetFastClockRate: rate=200
Oct 29 12:03:41: VMX|Host_SetFastClockRate: rate=100
Oct 29 12:03:41: VMX|Host_SetFastClockRate: rate=200
Oct 29 12:03:55: VMX|Host_SetFastClockRate: rate=100
Oct 29 12:03:55: VMX|Host_SetFastClockRate: rate=200

I disabled the clock sync (since I have the Linux image running ntp, anyway), and those messages went away, but the vmware-authd problems are still here. If I kill and restart VMware, then it will behave nicely for a while, then eventually start misbehaving again. I've tried other things (e.g., moving to the most current VMware guest tools on my Linux image), but to no avail. Also, note that the load average on Linux is 0.00. There's nothing running in there that's directly implicatable in the WinXP overhead.

Anyone have any other ideas on this? Should I downgrade myself to VMware version 2.x? Should I downgrade myself to Win2000? Sadly, I didn't report this during my 30-days of "free support", and I can't seem to find anything useful online (a Google search on vmware-authd, for example, only turns up one page of hits, none of which seem relevant).

*sigh*

Two things

1. Did you reinstall the vmware guest OS tools when you upgraded from VMware 2.X to 3.X?

2. The Vmware-authd runs as a Windows Service so you can't change its priority like other tasks you start as Windows services typically run under the "local system" account in Windows..

1. Did you reinstall the vmware guest OS tools when you upgraded from VMware 2.X to 3.X?

Originally, no, and it griped at me. The proper tools are now installed, and VMware is no longer complaining. The performance issues remain.