Downgrading didn't help but it did get rid of my audio scratching (another problem since WSL)! At least I hope so. The latency has been caused by high network traffic but then I've always run P2P clients.

When I uninstalled the latest Player I was watching a video at the same time and when the process finished the video stopped and all my sound through my Bluetooth headset went off. I believe that my VMWare install was still clinging to something that WSL turned on (Hyper-V, the other two virtualisation technologies and such) and it was that that was causing problems. Now I'm a bit afraid to touch anything as things are back as they were but I suppose I'll keep an eye out for the next VMW update and cross my fingers when I cross that bridge. I mean I can still use this slightly older version. Can I use Linux without major problems though? Now that's another story...

Thanks for your input wila. Your help with the logs was invaluable considering I wouldn't have known where to start. This whole thing could simply be down to Linux desktop's flaky stability but I still hold a suspicion that when I updated VMW a fundamental change was made in regards to WSL being present which caused disruption with access to resources or whatever. I'm way over my head here of course but you just get intuition based on observation; you know? I mean, for 4 out of 5 VMs all to have similar or the same problems at the same time and the only one unaffected being a very old one? Can't be coincidence.