We recently upgraded our vSphere infrastructure to ESXi version 5.0 Update 1a and we were having some issues upgrading the VMware Tools.

We were getting a Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime error related to TPVCGateway.exe. It appears that this was an issue that was resolved by an ESXi 4.1 patch.

The root cause in our case was that we disable the Print Spooler on all of our servers for security. Well this disabling caused an issue with the VMware Tools uninstaller if the Thin Print virtual print driver was installed.