It seems that having a standard Microsoft USB Bluetooth dongle hooked up to your machine with VMware Workstation 6 (or a newish version of another VMware product) will lead to a bluescreen upon bootup with the error message “INTERNAL_POWER_ERROR” and stop code 0x000000A0.
I’ve been having this problem for a long time, myself, it seems to have been introduced sometime during the Workstation 6 beta process (there were some earlier builds that did not cause this problem). People with this issue over at the VMware forums are the ones that I credit with actually tying this issue to VMware — VMware’s vmkbd.sys seems to be the root of the problem. (And, you can’t remove or disable it without removing keyboard functionality.) This forum thread also indicates that which version of Windows you’re using doesn’t matter; this issue has been produced on Windows XP and Windows Vista, 32-bit and 64-bit.
I had discovered that this problem could be solved by simply disconnecting the Bluetooth dongle at boot time and plugging it back in when Windows was done booting, but this is pretty annoying, and means that I have to remember to do it every time and also that I cannot restart my machine remotely. Back when this first started happening, I did some searching and read elsewhere on the Internet about people having this issue with this particular Bluetooth adapter, so I thought that was the only thing causing the issue; I didn’t connect it to VMware until I read that forum thread a few days ago, but looking back at the system logs indicates that this problem did indeed begin on the day after I updated to a new VMware build, 6.0.0.42757, on March 24 earlier this year. (Shame on me for not making this connection sooner.
)
The fact that vmkbd.sys is causing the problem prompted me to try this: You can work around this issue by disabling the “Bluetooth HID Device” under “Human Interface Devices” in the Device Manager. Of course, this will prevent you from using a Bluetooth keyboard or mouse. But it will also keep you from having this bootup bluescreen, and if you are in a situation like mine where you don’t even use a Bluetooth keyboard or mouse but have the dongle installed for other things, then this will solve the problem for now. The only other ways I know of to solve this would be to continue to remove the Bluetooth dongle every time the machine boots up, or, get a different Bluetooth adapter that does not use the built-in Windows Bluetooth drivers.
I think a full resolution has to come from VMware and I will be filing a problem report with them (though other people in the forum thread seem to have done so to no avail).
This post will be updated if I learn anything else.