I had the exact same thing happen on my W11 Home, Intel i5-10400, VMware Workstation 17.5.0 system too. I had PMC enabled, installed Ubuntu as the operating system, even rebooted several times, and everything ran fine. Only once I moved the VM to a different folder and fixed the path to bring the VM back into inventory, did I start getting these PMC counter errors and the VM won't start. I checked the .vmx file and there aren't any hard-coded paths that I see. Is there some way to reset the performance counters?