Last month, I was working a maintenance window for a customer that has VMware View 4 installed. During the window, I would install all the updates on the master image, snapshot it, and recompose the pool using the updated image. During the recompose, View would shutdown all the machines needing the update, delete them from the inventory, copy out a new replica disk, recreate all the VMs, attach them to the replica disk, and complete the setup process. This particular recompose could not delete one of the machines. The other machines finished the process normally and were ready to go, but this one machine simply timed out during the recompose process.

During my troubleshooting, I ended up killing the task and trying to delete the machine through the View console. No luck. I could delete the machine from the vSphere client, but then how would I clean it up from inside View? [more]

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1008658

This article provides the steps to manually remove a linked clone entry from VMWare View. The basic steps include:

  1. Remove the VM from the ADAM database
  2. Remove the linked clone reference from the View Composer database
  3. Delete the machine from vCenter

At that point, you can re-enable provisioning and everything should start working as normal once again.