Clearing VMWare Player Recent Virtual Machines list

By Eric / October 26, 2007

The VMWare Player does not include an option to clear the list of “Recent Virtual Machines” (why not?!?!). Since the list of virtual machines that I had opened was growing quite long, I set out to find a way to clear it myself.

After searching in a few places (Windows XP), I came across the file that holds this information. It’s called preferences.ini and is located in:
[drive]:\Documents and Settings\[user]\Application Data\VMWare

UPDATE: In Windows Vista, the file is located in:
[drive]:\Users\[user]\AppData\Roaming\VMWare

At the bottom of the file, you should see entries like (where X is a sequential number):

pref.mruVMX.filename = "..."
pref.mruVMX.displayname = "..."

Just delete/reorder the entries as desired, save, then start VMWare Player to see the changes. VMWare Player will need to be closed before you make the changes, or they will not be saved.

12 thoughts on “Clearing VMWare Player Recent Virtual Machines list”

Diana
January 28, 2008 at 8:45 am

Thanks!! 🙂
JD Nbrs
March 10, 2008 at 10:01 am

Know how todo this with Linux?
Eric Martin
March 10, 2008 at 9:43 pm

@JD Nbrs – I’m not sure, but you might be able to find a preferences file by doing a file-system search for “pref.mruVMX”
Alex Cohn
July 17, 2008 at 12:39 am

Thanks a lot!
David Campbell
September 4, 2008 at 9:39 pm

Regarding the question of how to clear the list on linux, it appears that VMware player uses Linux’s list of most recently used files.

You can clear the VMware player list by doing this [I’m using Fedora 8 Linux but likely to be similar to others]:

Choose Places/Recent Documents/Clear Recent Documents
then select that you really want to do it.

After that, if you restart VMware player, the list is clear and will be recreated when you open a VM.
Chew
October 11, 2008 at 6:17 am

Thanks for the hint, this issue became quite annoying 😉
Eric Martin
October 15, 2008 at 8:59 am

@David – thanks for the Linux tip!
selamy
November 25, 2008 at 7:01 am

thanks for the tip mate.. 😀
Jose V. Cabo
February 15, 2009 at 4:36 am

In (K)Ubuntu you must edit/delete the file:

$HOME/.recently-used.xbel

Thanks for the previous info. Without it I wouldn’t have not be able to figure out the solution in Linux.
Jon
April 2, 2009 at 5:41 am

Thanks, very useful. I renamed a virtual machine in VMWare inside the VMX file, and found that the old (incorrectly named) recently-used machine did not work correctly. It loaded, started, then caused a blue screen of death when I tried to kill it, in Vista.
Mark
April 3, 2009 at 9:39 am

Thanks it worked like a charm
Elena
June 8, 2009 at 3:16 am

Thanks for this tip! I use VMware everyday and had been looking for a way to get rid of that annoying list for months! 🙂

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