Workstation sharing is not enabled and says to go enable it.
Going to the enable page it fails to enable. Changing ports didn't help. It complains it can't connect to the server.
The workstation service is stopped. Manually starting it fails without meaningful error messages in the event logs.
Here is how I fixed it:
As admin run the following to manually start the service and capture std err:
C:\temp>"c:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Workstation\vmware-hostd.exe" -u c:\ProgramData\VMware\hostd\config.xml > hostd_err.log
Towards the end:
2013-12-28T00:27:08.090-06:00 [05264 panic 'Proxysvc'] Another process is listening on the proxy port.
2013-12-28T00:27:08.090-06:00 [05264 panic 'Proxysvc'] Please make sure other instances of hostd are not running
Find the pid of the program that is grabbing the port:
C:\temp>netstat -aon | findstr 0.0:443
TCP 0.0.0.0:443 0.0.0.0:0 LISTENING 3356
PID = 3356
Start task manager and find the program: Menu Bar of Task Manager/ View / Select Column / Check "PID" / Ok. Search for the PID.
For me it was Pando Media Booster, after checking their faq...
Turn off port 443 for pando media boosted (it's in control panel and stop it starting with windows while I'm there).
Sharing now works like a charm.
I have wkstn 9.0.3 but it should work for any version with sharing.
