Last week i was updating a VM with the last version of the VMware Tools. I initialized the update from VMware Vitual Center client. The installer starts, when the installer almost  finished the following error occours:

Error 1722. There is a problem with this Windows Installer package. A program run as part of the setup did not finish as expected. Contact your support personnel or package vendor.

The solution that works for my for this error at this VM (Windows 2003 OS) was to start the following services.

- Distributed Transaction Coordinaton.
- COM+ System Application.

If these services where not started, start this services and retry the update or install.
You can stop these services (if you want) after the installer has finished.