I too am having this issue and needed the VMCI for the same thing you are.
In my case, I am using Packer. Hitting "Enter" to dismiss the driver errors got it to successfully boot to desktop - once there, Packer was still waiting for an IP while I manually installed VM Tools (with no problems). The VM Tools installation completed and rebooted the machine, after which point Packer got the IP and continued the automated setup with no issues.
Hopefully that workaround helps you. This is still a bit of an annoyance, as I'd like the image creation to be totally hands-off. Looking forward to a resolution. It appears to be a OS version specific issue - the exact same workflow using Windows Server had no problems at all. I tried a few different versions of the VMTools ISO as well.
