PROBLEM SOLVED:

I had a seemingly unrelated issue.  My space bar was not working in MS Excel on my MAC. I researched the issue and found out that I had to shutoff "FULL KEYBOARD ACCESS" under the Accessibility Settings in Systems Settings.  I did that and then recalled that this was something turned on during the installation of Sonoma.  

After this fixed the Excel problem. I tried VMware Fusion and my VM started. It had to do some kind of repair but my Windows 11 VMs are working just fine now. 

I do not know why this worked or why it caused the problem in the first place. 

Thank you for all who tried to help.