After upgrading one of my servers i got “insserv: There is a loop between service umountnfs and open-vm-tools if stopped” .  A quick look in to the run script turns out that their is a dependency -> “# Required-Start:    $local_fs $remote_fs”.

Removing the “$remote_fs” fixed the dependency loop for me:

The corresponding section in the “open-vm-tools” script looks like:

### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides:        open-vm-tools
# Required-Start:    $local_fs
# Required-Stop:    $local_fs
# X-Start-Before:    $network
# X-Stop-After:        $network
# Default-Start:    2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop:        0 1 6
# Description:        Runs the open-vm-tools services
# Short-Description:    Runs the open-vm-tools services
### END INIT INFO

I’m using a Debian testing Distribution with Open-VM-Tools (2010.03.20-243334-4)