That feels like a good plan.
I hope you can get the version of VMware from someplace. In my archives, I found 7.1 Workstation 32-bit .deb -package. That was the oldest that I have. It is possible that this version opens up version 5 VMware without problems.
If you go for Player, which should work just as well, in the past, Player versions were not in sync with Workstation versions.
For double-checking the real reason for the problem, especially if it doesn't work according to your plan, you might want to create a new Win 2000 VM in the new environment and check all the requirements by doing so. Especially BIOS and VM config might require something that hasn't come up in this discussion.
