I've been searching for an answer to this for a while and just can't find it, so now I'm going to ask the question.
I've got a number of XP Professional VMs running on my Win 7 machine. I'm running an app that needs to see some Hardlock Keys from SafeNet. I installed the VMs and mapped the USBs and it worked OK for a while, and then one day I open my VMs up and there are no USB devices to be seen on the VMs. I talked to a co-worker and he said that his solution was to uninstall Workstation then reinstall and open the VMs and then re-map them. I did that but it happened again and uninstalling and reinstalling Workstation seems like a drastic way to solve this problem especially if it happens regularly.
Some of the solutions that I've found on this site have been to alter the .vmx file with the PID and VID, but I can't find that for these hardlock keys using regedit.
There is one thing that might be a problem with this and that is that the VMware VMCI Host Device has a triangle by it in the Device Manager on the host machine. I tried disabling and re-enabling it and searched for a software update as well but that didn't help.
This time the losing of the USB devices happened after I upgraded the software from 9.0.1 to 9.0.2, the first time there was no upgrade. There was also a problem with restarting the VMs after the upgrade but I found the solution to that by altering the .vmk file. I don't know if the two things are connected.