Oh man, I don't even know where to start. I'll try to be clear about what happened:
1. I booted up my Mac, opened VMWare like I always do, started my virtual Win7 machine.
2. While Win7 was booting up, the text on the screen for a long time said "Preparing Your Desktop".
3. Once Windows finally got to my start screen, it wasn't my start screen - a Win message popped up saying that this was a temporary profile.
4. At the same itme, I received the following messages on my screen: (1) from McAfee, a notice that VMWare Tools was trying to change my resgistry. (2) From VMWare Tools, the message "VMWare Tools has modified settings to enable sharing data with the host. You must log off to apply these settings. Press OK to log off now. Press cancel to log off later." I told McAfee to let VMWare Tools do whatever it wanted to do, and I clicked "OK" in the VMWare Tools message to log off.
5. While logging off/restarting, Win7 said it was installing 19 updates.
6. Upon restarting, I got the same "Preparing Your Desktop" error message, the same boot into a temporary profile, the same message from VMWare Tools, and a Win message that only 8 of my 19 updates had successfully installed (and upon closer examination, it doesn't really look like anything installed).
7. I tried booting into Safe Mode, and it won't do it. I tired stopping the VMWare Tools service, and that won't do anything. I am stuck in this loop of awfulness and not being an IT person (or working for a company who has one) I have no idea how to fix it. Sometimes, it will boot into the temporary profile, and my old Desktop files will be there, but I can't start Microsoft Outlook or do any of the things that I need to do on my computer. Now, when I start the virtual machine, I get this weird black screen with white text and a flipping slash that looks like some primivitve ASCII clock.
If anyone can help me here, I'd really appreciate it. I don't know where to start, and if my boss finds out I'm having more computer issues (this damn thing was never supposed to be set up this way, it was supposed to be set up by our ex-Mac-guys through Boot Camp with a partiioned hard drive), he'll explode.
Message was edited by: wila, removed profanity from the thread title. Please do not use strong words, we understand you can be frustrated from the event, but your language might disturb others for no reason.
