If you ever need to re-install View Composer, you may believe you have it uninstalled completely because you have no reason to believe otherwise, however, I ran into an issue where everything looked ok, yet whenever we attempted to install View Composer, the install would start, but would end with a roll back action quickly thereafter. In the VMINST log file stored in C:\Users\\AppData\Local\Temp, the only “error” I saw was:

C:UsersADMINI~1AppDataLocalTemp2{E5551EC5-436E-4A9D-AB4E-81DCA7403FB5};C:Program Files (x86)VMwareVMware View Composer
svm: 03/12/11 13:11:11 ERROR: SviCfgHelper_UnbindCertificate() returned value: 8
svm: 03/12/11 13:11:12 Certificate can not be found

What the heck is that? Honestly, I don’t know; but the first thing I did was delete any existing VMware Composer certificates, but that didn’t help. I came across a VMware support article dealing with a similar (but not exact) issue and it was stated that deleting any registry keys containing 18443 solved the issue. So, I tried it on my server as well and sure enough, I was able to complete the re-install of View Composer.