When installing workstation 7 experimental (e.x.p build-169612), all virtuals will run in debug mode. When starting virtal machine’s, the following message appears:

When looking at the debug options, you can not disable it. Offcourse this is necessary for VMware to troubleshoot their experimental build, but your virtuals will slow down a little bit.

To turn off the debugging mode you can do the following (stop vmware workstation):

1. Go to your installation path (normally C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Workstation)
2. Rename vmware-vmx-debug.exe to vmware-vmx-debug.old
3. Copy vmware-vmx.exe to vmware-vmx-debug.exe

If you start a virtual machine now, the message is gone and debugging is off.