I just upgraded VMware WS v9.x to v10.0.1 and, as for all past WS upgrades I upgraded the virtual hardware to version 10. All with one exception, that is. My Win98SE guest won't accept the virtual hardware upgrade from v9 to v10. I receive an error: "This virtual machine is not running the latest verison of VMWare Tools. You need to update VMware Tools before you can upgrade the virtual machine. For details on upgrading, see 'http://vmware.com/info?id=98'". I am running WS on a Win8.1 Pro host.
First off, I've never had to upgrade VMware Tools before upgrading the hardware. I've always upgraded the virtual hardware THEN upgraded VMware Tools. In fact, I just did it this way for my WinXP, Win7 and Ubunutu Linux VMs.
Second, there appears to be no new version of VMware Tools for Win98SE anyway. When I boot to the OS I get no automatic indication I should upgrade. When I go to the VM option in WS while the VM is running I only get the option to "Reinstall VMware Tools." And when I manually attach the winPre2k.iso to the virtual CD ROM and run setup I only get the options to repair/uninstall/reinstall. Reinstalling VMware Tools meets with the same original problem.
I recall something vaguely similar in the past where VMware released an upgrade which was problematic because they didn't release a new VMware Tools for Windows Pre2k guest operating systems and didn't bother to even update the version number in the winPre2k.iso file so it would work properly with the newest virtual hardware. I'm guessing something like this may have happened again. Either that or there's some kind of a bug. I'm remiss to contact VMware directly to report a bug through their support mechanism; the last time I did so it turned into a 6+ month long fiasco laden with many emails back and forth, conference calls to California and India, allowing remote control of my computer etc.
When I tried creating a new Win98SE VM, WS chose hardware version 10 which indicates to me Win98SE is supposed to run on this latest virtual hardware version.
So, recap: WS v10.x wants the latest Tools installed in the Win98SE VM guest in order to update the virtual hardware to v10 but doesn't accept that there IS NO new version of Tools. I marked this post as a question in case someone can offer insight toward a solution which I have missed. It is maddening to constantly run across problems like this in such a professional and expensive piece of software.