Thank you RDPetruska for responding.

Just so that you know my system info is as follows:

Office Desktop System Information as at Sep 21, 2022:

Host:
CPU: Intel Core i7 4770 @3.4 GHz

Host O/S:  
Kernel: Linux 5.4.0 125-generic (x86-64)
Distribution: Ubuntu 20.04.5 LTS

VMware: 
Product: VMware Workstation 15 Player
Version: 15.5.7 build-17171714

Existing Guest:
Windows 10

Target Guest:
Windows 2000

The contents of my old Windows 2K virtual machine are as follows:

caches
100GB.vmdk
2K.log
2K-s001.vmdk
2K-s002.vmdk
2K-s003.vmdk
2K-s004.vmdk
2K-s005.vmdk
2K-s006.vmdk
2K-s007.vmdk
2K-s008.vmdk
2K-s009.vmdk
2K-s010.vmdk
2K-s011.vmdk
2K-SPH-Office-be54c450.vmem
2K-SPH-Office-be54c450-vmss-sph
2K-SPH-Office.vmsd
2K-SPH-Office.vmx
2K-SPH-Office.vmxf
2K.vmdk
2K.vmem
2K.vmsd
2K.vmx~
2K.vmxf
564d55b2-7061-22ef-314d-fa2a45f41228.vmem
nvram

This old Windows 2k virtual machine was originally created using VMware Workstation 5 and the *.vmdx files are not recognized by my current VMware Workstation 15 Player program.

When I open my current VMware Workstation 15 Player and I try to 'open an existing machine' using the Windows 2k directory above. It doesn't work. The VMware loading splash page appears briefly then the VMware Workstation 15 Player simply shuts down. That's the problem that I describe in my original post.

Could you expand on your suggestion to mount the *.vmdx? Without an earlier version of VMware running, my linux operating system isn't going to be able to read the *.vmdx files which contain the Windows 2k o/s and the individual document files that are contained therein.

I may not be understanding your suggest. If so please forgive me.