One more piece of information ... if I try to install vmtools for this VM (Ubuntu 22.10) Fusion tells me that "VMware Tools is not available for this guest". Their website says that they support "Ubuntu Linux 8.04 through 12.04"

If I'm using:

    debugStub.listen.guest64.remote = "TRUE"

then I'm assuming that the gdb stub should be running inside the guest somehow. Otherwise how do they intercept any requests to this IP:port? Perhaps vmtools is a must have? 

I have a lot invested in 22.10 (I'm working on a Linux filesystem book and have a kernel-based filesystem for 5.19.7) - perhaps I'm paying the price for not working on older, stable versions