I'd suggest you take a look at the DiskMount utility (vmware-mount from http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/developer/forums/vddk) which allows you to map the snapshot to your client without the need to modify anything on the host. Not sure whether it has been fixed, but there's been an issue with this tool in the 5.1 version, so you may want to go with the 5.0 version
André