In vSphere 6.5 and some simultaneous updates to earlier versions, VMware moved away from NPAPI (since Google is set on killing it) and instead introduced two new consoles, the HTML5 browser console which is quite frankly horrible (especially without VMTools), as well as a new “thick” console that installs on the client machine called VMware Remote Console. This is a welcome development, as moving away from NPAPI can’t come a day too soon, and anything that isn’t Flash based is always nice.
There’s only one problem, the install frequently fails on Windows 10.
The error VMRC throws is quite cryptic as well; “Failed to install hcmon driver”. This is usually because the VMRC installer fails to play nicely with UAC in Windows, and for some reason doesn’t manage to get the required permissions from the OS to install the hcmon driver (which seems to be a virtual USB something that you’ll probably never need anyway). The workaround is quite simple, give it the required permissions from the get-go, so that it can bypass UAC altogether. The normal way to do this would be to right-click the installer and select “Run as Administrator”. However, I’ve not managed to get this to work on any machine I’ve tried it on.
The way that works on the other hand that I’ve found, is to open up an elevated PowerShell prompt and call the installer from there.
Navigate to the directory where you downloaded the VMRC installer, type in (and tab-complete) the name of the installation package, and press enter. After this, the install should continue smoothly.
Grumpy Techie 
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