All I had to do was stop and restart the vmware services
(system>>administration>>services under Fedora 8) after I
logged in to be able to access Web Management. Found out about it
accidentally when I ran the vmware-config again to see if it solved the
problem and saw it stopping and starting the same service.

Experimented first by stopping and starting xinetd but that didn't change anything.

I never noticed the host being stopped after I reboot but apparently it had stopped.

I'm trying to see if this has anything to do with the fact that I still have IPv6 enabled on my machine.

Now, I'm also trying to experiment with the httpd service if it will
allow me to start the same thing if I add the docroot as a subfolder.
I'm only trying this out for people who have the httpd service enabled
by default and therefore gets the test page when they try to open
"http://localhost".

It would be great if we could somehow find what's causing the host
services to stop or why we still need to stop and restart the vmware
services after reboot.

We could create a startup script stopping and starting the service.

edit: for windows users there should be a service under winXP (or most NT based windows flavors) called VMware host services or something that would stop and needs restarting.

Update:

IPv6 is not the culprit. I've disabled it (including the ipv6 firewall service and removing the ::1 entry in /etc/hosts) but still get the same results after reboot. Looks like stopping and starting the vmware service is the only way to get this working for now. Will still mess around with this some more.

Am currently trying another work around for machines with httpd enabled since web management interface is using the same port (80) to publish pages. messing around with the vmware config file. wish me luck.