Adding more information to the post above...

The blank screen of the autostarted VMs (started from the autostart service configured to run as the user I'm logging in as...) seems to be temporarily resolvable by powering off the vm and starting it again from the vmware workstation application.  If I do this, the console appears again.  If I reboot the computer and let the autostart service start the vm, then log in as my user and open vmware workstation, the blank screen is back until I manually reboot the virtual machine.  This is 100% reproducible on my system.