It did not, so I created it and chmod'd it 700 (owner root), but it doesn't seem to have changed anything.

Yeah, I'm trying to avoid that, but I may not have a choice. What's strange to me is that I get to the point where the VI Client shows me which VMs are running on the host and asks me which folder to put them in when I'm attempting to reconnect, but then it claims that it can't reach the host, so it does seem as though some process is not responding as expected.

For anyone watching this thread, the solution was to restart xinetd on the ESX host.