After resurrecting an old VMware installation (I started with the first freely available version of VMware.. version 1) and upgrading successfully (see this post), I was not able to update Vmware Tools within my guest OS (Windows XP SP3). I tried the automatic update option as well as the interactive update option. Both resulted in Visual Studio’s JIT (Just-In-Time) Debugger complaining and aborting the upgrade (on the guest OS).
Solution: Within the guest OS (WindowsXP in my case), uninstall VMware Tools and restart the guest OS. After restarting the guest OS the VMware UI “VMware Tools”-section will have changed from “Upgrade VMware Tools” to “Install VMware Tools”. Clicking the latter installed a fresh version of VMware tools without any problems.
This worked with VMware-server-2.0.1-156745 in combination with host OS Ubuntu 9.04 and guest OS Windows XP SP3.