For some this may be a serious and nasty bug.
It appears that after a while, you'll exhaust your options and you'll come across this once again after you've allowed the software in preferences, after you've run sudo spctl --master-disable and after everything you've tried that you've found on the internet. That's what's happened to me.
Quick background: I'm a developer that works on hybrid projects and the .NET stack running a windows machine in my mac, so my setup is more intensive and requires Visual Studio, git, npm, node, all that stuff installed on the vm os system as well as my mac system. My mac system version as of this writing: Mojave 10.14.5 (18F132), Fusion pro 10.
I'm not sure what the technical issues are for the bug but I know it has something to do with accessibility, and also that VMWare says the ball is in Mac's court to fix it. I know that it triggers when I suspend my vm on my host and unplug my monitors at work and plug in new monitors at home then go to open it back up again. It will glitch and cause this error and there's nothing I can do about it except completely uninstall and reinstall VMWare fusion with restarts, sometimes multiple times and can take up to at least an hour to fix.
I dealt with this for the last 6 months or so by having to completely uninstall/restart/install the application and it's been brutal. I put in a ticket to VMWare to address it a while ago, that's why I know they think it's Mac's job to fix it. They said to me they were in communication with Mac in regards to this issue, that it's already a known issue at this time. The last mac update appears to have mitigated the issue some, but I still ran into this issue when I unplugged a monitor WHILE VmWare fusion was suspending so it still exists.
For those of you who may be at your wits end, a reinstall is your only option, and that includes a full restart and may include having to be hooked up to the monitors and other peripherals that you last had your vm working on if you frequently move your computer around (like in my case a macbook pro from home to work). Yes, it's that strange. Below is my todo list:
- Go back to the environment where your vm was last working
- Hook up the peripherals you had connected to your mac when your vm was working (including extra monitors). (Why? Because when I did this exact procedure outside of the environment it was last working on, it would not work. I had to do multiple reinstalls and eventually just went back in for it to finally take. Yes it was that ridiculous.)
- Delete the VMWare Fusion in
/Applications
- Run the script below in your terminal:
# Reset VMWare Fusion when it explodes again
# What the script above does is remove all the references to the vmware application itself.
# It does not affect your vm but of course double check your vms aren't located in any of these directories, it shouldn't be by default.
sudo rm -rf /Library/Application Support/VMware
sudo rm -rf /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion
rm -rf /Library/Preferences/VMware Fusion
rm -rf ~/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion
rm -rf ~/Library/Caches/com.vmware.fusion
rm -rf ~/Library/Preferences/VMware Fusion
rm -rf ~/Library/Preferences/com.vmware.fusion.LSSharedFileList.plist
rm -rf ~/Library/Preferences/com.vmware.fusion.LSSharedFileList.plist.lockfile
rm -rf ~/Library/Preferences/com.vmware.fusion.plist
rm -rf ~/Library/Preferences/com.vmware.fusion.plist.lockfile
rm -rf ~/Library/Preferences/com.vmware.fusionDaemon.plist
rm -rf ~/Library/Preferences/com.vmware.fusionDaemon.plist.lockfile
rm -rf ~/Library/Preferences/com.vmware.fusionStartMenu.plist
rm -rf ~/Library/Preferences/com.vmware.fusionStartMenu.plist.lockfilea
- Restart your computer
- After boot, go to your vmware personal account on the internet, download the vmware fusion installer again.
- Open up and install it
- DO NOT OPEN YOUR VM OR YOU MAY HAVE TO REPEAT THIS PROCESS AGAIN. After installing vmware fusion, restart your computer again.
- After restart you should be able to open up your vm once again.
Hope this helps. If for some reason this doesn't work, make sure you are at the last place your vm worked with whatever peripherals you had plugged into your mac on again. That might sound strange but this low level bug issue is a strange and painful bug so don't take any chances having to uninstall/reinstall/restart multiple times before you finally get it working again.
POST CATALINA UPDATE
It appears that the Catalina update for MacOS fixes the issue. Whenever I boot up my VM, it now asks twice if I want use the software and it works every time. I haven't come across this issue since the update and I've been using it everyday. The update is still pretty fresh, only a couple weeks old so if I run into the issue again, I'll update this thread. So far though, no problems.
Since the topic is locked: For me the issue was rather that I had a keyboard extension Karabiner-Elements installed, which somehow interfered with VMWare, and I saw this error. After removing it and restarting my mac, the error was gone. – Holger Brandl – 2018-09-20T14:51:05.103