Hi again,
I'd take an email with a "standardised reply" (which is what that quote looks like) from support with a grain of salt, at least at this "early stage". What we DO have is a statement from a VMware rep following this discussion that this is a bug. So I will hold my horses and cross my fingers for now... 
Just love playing the waiting game... Guess I should only blame myself for rushing an update - had it been for corporate and not home use I wouldn't have run it yet...
Hi all,
i recieved this answer from support last friday:
"We raised a bug on this and I see that they are earmarking this fix for Vsphere 5.0 Update 2
That is quite a long way off I'm afraid (Next year)"
:smileyshocked: 
regards,
Urs
Thanks for that info/link, CaptainLen - this confirms what Gleed stated a week ago, I would even guess this is the very same Gleed that made the blog post on the VMware vSphere Blog... 
Thanks for your help, Kyle!
Hi there,
I just managed to get this problem. And I made a little script to work around it for now.
By modifying this you may get the solution you want, this is how I did it.
- First off, connect to your VMware ESXi hypervisor with VMware vSphere Client.
- Go to the Configuration-tab on the host
- Select Security Profile
- Preferences on services.
- Find SSH in the list and click Options
- Enable SSH
- Use a SSH-client like PuTTy to connect to your host.
- Once logged into the host, run the command "vim-cmd vmsvc/getallvms" to find all VMs on your host and theire IDs (first column). Note the IDs for the VMs you would like to autostart. Or if you would like to start everyone, theres no need to remember the ID.
- Now edit /etc/rc.local with the editor "vi" using this command "vi /etc/rc.local"
- To enter insert-mode in "vi" press "i"-key.
- Somewhere in that file (I put mine above the if-statement) write this if you want every VM to autostart:
- for i in $(vim-cmd vmsvc/getallvms|cut -f1 -d" "|grep -v Vmid); do vim-cmd vmsvc/power.on $i; sleep 10; done
- And if you only would like to start a few of the VMs on the host, this will be enough:
- vim-cmd vmsvc/power.on ID_OF_VM
- sleep NUMBER_OF_SECONDS (10 in my case)
- vim-cmd vmsvc/power.on ID_OF_VM2
- etc...
- When you are done editing, press ESC-key to exit "insert"-mode and then write ":wq" to write and quit.
- Reboot your host and the VMs should autostart once again.
I'm running the latest VMware ESXi 5.0 from HP, the ISO i used was: 5.0_U1_Mar_2012_ESXi_HD-USB-SDImgeInstlr_Z7550-00352.iso
Hopefully this will help someone
Regards,
Robin