Windows 7: Need help running MS VPC/VHD on VMPlayer

I've been using the free VMPlayer to run a guest Windows 7-32 system on my Windows 7-64 host, and it has worked well. I like it much better than Microsoft's VirtualPC, which has been very flaky for me. Now I want to try VMPlayer with a free vhd image that Microsoft offers to try out the full Visual Studio product.

I've seen several places on the net that say VMPlayer can mount VHD and VPC files natively, but I saw others that imply you first need to run it through VMware converter. That's a small, free download, so I installed the standalone Converter 5.0. But when I tried to mount the VPC in VMPlayer, I got a message saying that Converter was not configured correctly, uninstall it and try again.

Converter gave me no options during the install to configure anything but the install folder, and I used the default for that, so I don't see what good reinstalling it would do. So I'm asking the experts:

a) do I actually need Converter to run VirtualPC images in VMPlayer? I would rather not have two 50GB images if I only need one. If you run a vpc file on VMPlayer, is it slower than if you run a conversion? Are the answers the same for VMWare's Workstation, which is evidently more powerful than VMPlayer?




b)if I do need Converter, what am I missing about the install that makes VMPlayer give me that message? I would guess that if I converted the image first and then opened it in VMPlayer it would work, but again, it's 50 freaking GB, and that would take up almost all my free space, and probably take several hours to run, so I don't want to do it unless I have to.

Thanks for any help with this.

Well, I went ahead and tried it for a different vhd, one that was just a gigabyte. The converter ran successfully, the machine started up fine in VMPlayer, but then the guest OS (Win XP SP3) gave all kinds of "found new hardware" messages. Evidently, just about everything was different - the network adapter, the display adapter, the IDE, the motherboard, and a bunch of other stuff.

I didn't bother trying to install new drivers, because I also got a message that since the hardware had changed, I had to activate within three days. There is no way to activate it --- Microsoft says it should run until April, but will not pass Genuine Activation (see here: Download: IE App Compat VHD - Microsoft Download Center - Download Details).

So I guess MS put enough bombs in its code that I can't run this with VMWare. Too bad, I like it so much better than Virtual PC.

It's not really "bombs" in the code, but rather as you said, the hardware is seen as totally different and it's causing a pre-activated copy to force activation again. All of the vm systems present slightly different hardware to the guest....