VMware Authorization Service not running

Today I had an interesting error when powering on a virtual machine in VMware Workstation 9 on my Windows 7 host.
When powering on the virtual machine I got the message “The VMware Authorization Service is not running”.

In the services windows the VMware Authorization Service (AS) was indeed not running. So, I thought, let’s fire it up and continue working. This was also the resolution in VMware’s Knowledge Base. However, starting the AS resulted in an error message about a not running “Windows Management Instrumentation” (WMI) service it apparently depends on.
In the same services window the status of this WMI-service was “running”. Hhmm…

The Event viewer showed some errors related to this service:

Event filter with query “SELECT * FROM __InstanceModificationEvent WITHIN 60 WHERE TargetInstance ISA “Win32_Processor” AND TargetInstance.LoadPercentage > 99″ could not be reactivated in namespace “//./root/CIMV2” because of error 0x80041003. Events cannot be delivered through this filter until the problem is corrected.

So, I thought, the status of the WMI-service probably shows the wrong status.
An internet search to this error pointed me to Microsoft’s support website. On this page, in the Cause-paragraph it said:

These events are not indicative of any issue in the system and can be safely ignored.

So, probably this wasn’t the root cause of my problem after all. More searching didn’t result in extra information or new ideas. So, finally I fired up the installer with the idea to reinstall VMware Workstation. However, the installer gave me the option to repair the installation as well. That is what I did and that did the trick. Now I can happy VMwaring again.
Later, after some extra internet searching, I learned that this might occur more often. So, if you have the same problem as I had, I hope you’ll find some useful information in this blog. And don’t have to spend as much time as I did to fix it.