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.

You can click OK to the error and the tools uninstall/upgrade will run fine, but if you're trying to do an unattended upgrade of VMware Tools this error will stop the upgrade midstream and the upgrade won't complete until that OK dialog is clicked.

Here is the patch information where the issue was resolved:

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd...

Hope this helps.

Cheers.