I’ve used VMWare now and then for my virtual machines. And I think, it is the best virtualization software out there in market (but not anymore, I like Virtual BOX more than VMWare). When I was trying out VMWare Workstation on my new machine, I found that I was not able to use USB sticks on any Virtual machines.
When I checked services, I found that “VMware USB Arbitration Service” was stopped. I tried to start that service manually and got greeted with following message,
Error 31: A device attached to the system is not functioning.
And service failed to start. So that was the culprit !! After some Googling I found that it was mainly because something is wrong with USB drivers. And mainly because use of non-MSFT USB Controller driver. Which didn’t make any sense to me because all usb ports were working just fine. I had never seen this error before, but I found that if host OS has AMD processors then it is very likely that AMD uses some special USB drivers called “USB Filter Driver” !! No wonder why I haven’t seen this error before, because till I built this new machine I was using Intel processors 
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Anyways, fix is pretty simple. I just had to remove that “USB Filter Driver”. Luckily I had a utility called ATI Catalyst Manager which allowed me to uninstall those drivers without any hack. Once I removed driver and rebooted my OS, I was able to access USB devices from Virtual Machines.
That’s it for now.
It’s Just A Thought … 
