VMAudioBackHost: A new way to fix sound for Windows 2000/XP guests on VMware Workstation

Since a couple of years, Windows 2000 and XP guests running inside VMware Workstation suffer from sound issues - in many cases, you will get a lot of stutter and distortion.

There were a couple of fixes over the years like VMAudioFixTray and VMAudioBack, but due to some changes in Windows 10/11 and current VMware Workstation releases, they mostly stopped working.

Thankfully, there's a new tool called VMAudioBackHost. Instead of running inside the guest OS, it targets the host OS directly by injecting a timing fix into the VMware process. A more in-depth explaination about the fix is provided in the project's readme.

I tried this on my Windows 11 host with VMware Workstation 17 and a Windows 2000 VM, and I can confirm that this fully fixes all sound issues.

I upgraded to VMWare Workstation 17.6 yesterday, and it looks that even without using the tool, the problems are gone on Windows XP. In fact, both audio and even 3D acceleration just works, I guess they fixed something for the current Windows 11 version.

Can someone confirm that this is not just a happy mistake on my end?

Okay, more news.

I updated my machine to Windows 11 24H2 this morning, and now the CPU virtualization counter stuff broke again (which breaks basically each and every update). Even though Hyper-V and Core Isolation is disabled, I can't get to boot the VM with these options enabled - and without them, the sound issues are back again.

Turns out that you _really_ don't want to update until _after_ the VMware update that grants compatibility... sigh.

UPDATE: I rolled back to yesterday's backup which is still on 23H2 and the issues are gone, so I am very confident that 24H2 is the culprit.