Removing VMWare Player - blank grey dialogue box

I've just spent way too long trying to upgrade VMWare Player on my laptop.  The issue was that, when I tried to uninstall the incumbent version, I was presented with an unhelpful blank grey dialogue box...  Notice the lack of, well, anything.

The box didn't go away , even after a couple of hours waiting -  left it because I was wondering if something was being unpacked in the background.  This kind of information is frustratingly difficult for me to get at on a windows machine...  Eventually, I had to use Task Manager to kill it.  I went through a few iterations of this trying out a few different ways of uninstalling or running the newer installer (even setting different default browsers since the contents of the box turned out to be HTML and I thought it might be a compatibility issue - but computer says "no"). 


I looked around for solutions & came across the following, which worked for me:


http://superuser.com/questions/245424/vmware-workstation-install-problem


The most pertinent advice was:

• To uninstall any old version, go to C:\Windows\Installer
• Add the "Authors" column and sort by it
• One of the .msi files with have a "VMware" author
• Double-click it and follow through with the uninstall steps

After uninstalling the older VMWare Player using this method, I was then able to install the latest version and get playing with my brand spanking new ACE image.  Success!