Whenever I try to change what ISO a VM has in its CD drive through the VM's preferences or CD drop-down menu, it locks up with a wait cursor. I feel like if I were to wait several hours it might allow me to select an ISO, but I'm too impatient for that, so I just edit the VM's .vmx file to change the setting. However, this doesn't seem to let me use the ISOs stored on my NTFS-formatted external hard drive, which I use Tuxera NTFS to write to. macOS has a built-in ability to read from NTFS volumes, so that shouldn't be the problem. Anyway, does anyone know how to fix the lockups? Thanks.
For the Tuxera issue, those types of products have a long and sordid history of incompatibly and data corruption/loss. No real surprise that it has issues.
The lockups may very well be part of the above (i.e. would be interesting to try it with the Tuxera software uninstalled) - it sounds like it's locking up waiting for volumes to mount.
I tried disabling Tuxera and then trying again, and VMware Fusion still locked up, so it can't be Tuxera.
Edit: The hang seems to last for about 20-30 minutes, maybe a little less.
You'd have to uninstall it and reboot to be sure.
But you could also test removing the VMX entry completely, unplugging all external drives, and then see if it locks up with nothing pre-populated.