I have been getting a recurring Broken Pipe Error message in recent months, preventing me from opening the VM Fusion virtual machine. I tried a number of the solutions on the forum without benefit, but had my office IT guys work on it for 2 days.  This occurred even after fresh installs and upgrade of both my MacOS and upgrade of VMFusion.  I am now using a Mac Desktop running Catalina ver 10.15.7 with VMFusion Ver 12.1.2 using Windows 10 as the guest system.

Ultimately the problem was found to be inability to access the /tmp folder and the effective solution, every time so far this has recurred, is to use Terminal  to recreate the /tmp/vmware-username folder and re-define ownership using chown.

If the UserName is "User_Name" then the solution is  

sudo mkdir /tmp/vmware-User_Name

sudo chown User_Name /tmp/vmware-User_Name

Check it works by      ls -dl /tmp/*. 

My question is- This is a recurring problem with a clunky fix, and several other users have had this issue judging from the online forums and combined Angst.  Is VMWare able to provide a software patch or fix in the near future to avoid this problem?  

The problem seems to be in getting the VM running, not in accessing Windows10 but exactly why I don't know.  I suspect it has something to do with automatic software updates in the MacOS but it doesn't make sense to stop those for security reasons.  Can we expect a solution from VMWare?