ShaddamIV wrote: No luck. Looking at the VMX file, I can't find out what might be the toggle... which is why I was thinking that maybe it got lost at some point.

Information for Virtual Machine's that are set to "Start automatically when VMware Fusion launches" is stored in the /Users/${USER}/Library/Preferences/com.vmware.fusion.plist file in the powerOnAtStartup.cfg array.  It's a binary .plist file so you'll need an appropriate Viewer.  If you have Xcode installed that will do or you can use a program like TextWrangler, Pref Setter or via Terminal using defaults as shown in the example below.

defaults read com.vmware.fusion.plist powerOnAtStartup.cfg

(Click image to enlarge.)