I opened an evaluation issue with VMware support with all the details, diagnostic reports, and what I have done with it so far. They replied with a list of things for me to try.
At the top of their list was to run the Disk Utility 'Repair Disk Permissions'. This had also been suggested by some of the KB articles that I had already seen. In fact, I had previously run 'Verify Disk Permissions' and it displayed a few issues. Being somewhat new to the OS X environment, I was reluctant to run anything called 'Repair' because I do not yet have a backup plan for my system. Since the permission issues revealed were not related to VMware in any obvious way I did not run 'Repair'.
Knowing that I had to follow the support techs recommendation, I crossed my fingers and ran 'Repair Disk Permissions'. Well, lo and behold, that fixed the problem! I am now running into other issues, but that one is resolved.
Thank you for the help given to me in this forum.
Message was edited by: ranwaldo to set 'Answered'.