You are welcome @jhbb    . We all have very old computers, which sometimes are needed later on ... so, no problem there.

As for getting your old VM shut down properly, I think you do need the old Host to do that. It's a windows thing, which I'm not fully familiar with, but I think that things like computer architecture, namely processor, play a role in trying to get the computer up and running from a standby/suspend/hibernate state. So, if you have the exact same (or very similar) hardware present, I think it is doable. I cannot think of any simpler solution that this.

Luckily with Linux recreating the same computer (or similar) is not really a big problem. I hope you have the old VMware software available at some place ... if you need any recreation.

For simplicity, you can also run the VMs from an external USB drive and perhaps thus reduce the number of required copies. From SSD/USB-3 VMware runs really well. For this use, even USB-2 is reasonably fast. External HDDs work too, but are very slow in comparison.

Also, keep a relevant VM backup somewhere from each step.