I think the autostart feature is new to 17.5. It is available only in Windows hosts. Don't know how different it is from starting vmrun -nogui manually but there is the convenience factor of not having to login to the host. On the surface it looks a bit similar to the Shared VMs feature which was killed off in 16.x, resurrected somewhat and killed off again in 17.x
I use mainly 16.2.5 on an Ubuntu host; but don't see these sort of problems when I close a running VM window and keep it running in the background and then reopen it. VMware Workstation on Linux is a different beast though when it comes to the graphics layer.
I forgot to mention that the VMs have to be restarted after adding those two lines in the config.ini so that at least the vmware-vmx.exe explicitly starts without trying to enable ISB rendering. It does not look promising though as the vmware.log snippet showed multiple times to start GDIPresentation; so vmware-vmx.exe is probably already aware there is no mksSandbox process to look for.
2024-03-17T04:09:14.467Z In(05) mks MKS-HWinMux: Failed PreDefineWindow (MKSWindowId=0)
2024-03-17T04:09:14.468Z In(05) mks MKS-HWinMux: Started GDI presentation backend.
2024-03-17T04:09:17.277Z In(05) mks MKS-HWinMux: Failed PreDefineWindow (MKSWindowId=0)
2024-03-17T04:09:17.277Z In(05) mks MKS-HWinMux: Started GDI presentation backend.
If you can install a cheap and cheerful Nvidia graphics card into the R630 it might make a difference; even an entry level Nvidia graphics card is better than none though for 17.5.x the minimum for Nvidia is Maxwell Gen 2 to use DX12; so perhaps a Pascal GT1030 or its entry level Quadro equivalent; older than that require additional vmx configuration. An extra monitor won't be required as the GPU can still function as render device without having an actual display. With Nvidia GPU, it won't be GDI presentation backend; as it will have to be either DX12 or DX11 presentation back end, depending on the GPU used on the Windows host.
