Hello,
I'm sorry, you are absolutely right there. I completely forgot that the new vmware player has a graphical interface to do this now.

The problem with that is when something goes wrong with the graphical shell....
One thing you could try is to run vmplayer from the command line in a terminal this usually will return an error on problems it might run into.
So run it as:
/usr/bin/vmplayer
and post any errors you might see back here in your reply.
--
Wil