This can happen after a catastrophic crash (e.g. loss of power to the host machine), and it seems to be corruption of the VM state files. I have not had much luck in selective deletion of those. What DOES work, and is surprisingly quick 'n' easy, is to create a new duplicate virtual machine (it's good to have notes or screenshots of all the settings), fire it up once, shut it down, then move the malfunctioning VM's virtual hard drive(s) into the new machine, and change its settings to use them (tell it to take over or at least share the drive with the original), and be sure to tell it to boot off the original's boot drive. Actually move the drive files; don't try to call them in the new VM from their old-VM location. On a Mac host machine, you will need to right-click or ctrl-click the old VM and do "Show package contents" and do the same on the new VM, then move the vmdk files from one to the other. You remove the new VM's original, default drive, and add the old VM's drive at its new location. After you boot up the replacement VM and ensure it works, remove the old one from VMWare Fusion (or VMWare Workstation, whatever) and throw out the broken VM's left over files in Finder (mac) or Explorer (Windows). I would then re-run the VMWare Tools installer on the new VM, and also ensure that it has properly operating host–guest file share stuff that you want.
This whole process took under 5 minutes the last time this happened to me.
