I reimported the appliance. I updated the virtual hardware to VMware workstation 8. I reinstalled the VMware tools including the --clobber-kernel-modules=vmxnet and the error went away.
I still couldn't ping and got a "network is unreachable" error. The ifconfig output looked odd, so I shutdown the VM, removed the nic, restarted the VM and removed all the entries in /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules, then I shutdown the VM again, added a nic and all appears to be good.
I changed a lot of things, so I don't have the pinpoint solution for remedying the issue. I could be as simple as updating the vmware tools and cleaning up the /etc/udev entries to remove "old" mac addresses...
Dennis