After fiddling around with my latest VM running on my ESX server I experienced, that I could not remove the installed and by now outdated VMWare-Tools.

This is most likely because I just imported a VMWare from VMWare Workstation into the ESX 🙁

OK, but there is hope!

Removing the info from the registry worked the best for me. Search for vmware tools.msi in the registry. Delete the subkey similar to [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes\Installer\Products\8E24D35BB278E034284D0860A513CF1E] that appears in the search with the vmware tools.msi info inside. If you’re paranoid export the subkey to a reg file first, just in case.

After this procedure you should be able to remove the existing installation of VMWare-Tools and install the tools supplied by the ESX.