One of our test beds was experiencing an issue upgrading the VMWare Player from version 3 to version 5.

Each time we tried to install version 5, the installer would try to uninstall version 3 and fail with the following message:

The MSI Failed” or The MSI Fails”

Trying to uninstall Version 3 through add/remove programs provided the same error.

The “Program Install and Uninstall troubleshooter” from Microsoft didn’t fix the issue either.

The solution was to launch the vmware install file from a command line with the following /z “action”=”install”

ie VMware-player-5.0.0-812388.exe /z “action”=”install”

This provided the fix and allowed VMWare Player to upgrade successfully.

If the above solution does not resolve your problem, please feel free to contact us on 014852222.