I've just encountered the same problem. immediately after adding the line:
managedVM.autoAddVTPM = "software"
and booting the machine the hard drive got encrypted. I was never prompted to set a password so of course, I don't know the password.
However my machine still boots without asking for encryption password, so I can still use it so far but I can't export it to ovf template and I think I can't copy it either.
Very weird scenario. VMWARE should check this out ASAP since more and more users are losing their data.
