If I understand it correctly, this is only occurring on this particular Guest and not any of the other ones you have.  And, that when this Win 7 Guest is moved to another machine (laptop) the USB devices are also greyed out.  

This would then imply that the issue is with this particular Guest.  May I then suggest a couple of things:

• Create a new VM with Win7 and see if this is the same.
• take a look at the .vmx files for this Guest and compare it with a VM that is working, ideally another Win 7.

It's not entirely clear from the description as to whether this has only recently occurred or always been the case, or whether this is a newly created VM.

However, with regards to whether it's related to the Workstations Player version . . . as an exercise I dusted off a copy of Win 7 Pro SP1, and created a VM on Workstation Player 16.2.1 and was able to present a USB drive, both with, and without the Tools installed on the Guest OS.