This was really helpful for me as I just ran into the same problem which was also blocking my 6.5 upgrade. Through discussion with VMware - in addition, line 46 in your example should be updated to include your specific hostID obtained using:

cat /etc/vmware/install-defaults/sca.hostid

After that I found that an additional line was required before the service would start correctly:

eam.web.root=/usr/lib/vmware-eam/web

Finally, in case this was done using the root user you might find it necessary to set the permissions correctly for the properties file if it was deleted/recreated:

chown eam:cis eam.properties

chmod -R 644 eam.properties

Hope this helps if someone else runs into this issue during an upgrade..