Accepted Solutions
I did power my vm down completely last night, thought that Time Machine had run automatically after that (i.e. looked at the time/date info on its timeline), then powered down my MBP before swapping the drive.
- Randomly pick a different TM restore point to restore from (no way to tell which others were/weren't done at a point my VM was powered off)?
This is where the inconsistency thing comes in. Time Machine does incremental backups hourly, not full backups, so I would guess that your best chance would be to find the oldest backup, which would hopefully be a "full" backup of the virtual machine. But if that first backup was with the virtual machine running, then it probably won't be a good backup either.
- Upgrade to VMWare 3.1.2 to see if that makes a difference? (realize I'm reaching with that one 🙂
Almost certainly won't make a difference. You could try since it's available as a 30 day trial (if you haven't already purchased it.) Anything's possible, but I wouldn't place any bets.
- Rollback to an earlier VM snapshot? (I could not take one prior to the hard drive swap because I didn't have enough free space...but I have one from about 1 week ago.)
Snapshots are not backups. Since you have nothing to lose, you can try. But make a copy the virtual machine as is first so that you can try again if necessary.
Before I give up and start building a new vm (will have to painfully reinstall lots of Windows software....and I'm concerned I'll run into licensing/activation issues), do you recommend any of the following:
If you have a typical "retail" version of Windows, don't worry about reactivating. If it doesn't activate over the internet as normal, then just call the toll-free number and punch in codes on a touch tone phone (or speak with the operator.) If they ask, just tell them the truth, that you're reinstalling Windows after a replacing the hard drive. I've never been refused a reactivation, but I'm also not calling to reactivate the same product key 20 times in a month. 
I'm going to say that if you can't start in Safe Mode, it's probably going to be easier to just reinstall Windows. Mount the virtual hard disk to copy off your data files, if necessary, but just create a new virtual machine and install Windows clean. Tedeious, yes, but relatively straightforward, and just mark it off as a lesson learned the hard way. 
Your install of Windows was probably having issues already so this BSOD likely would have happened regardles of the hard drive replacement or Time Machine procedures.
(As an aside, what I did when I upgraded my MBP's 200GB drive with a 500GB, several months ago, I installed OSX clean on th 500GB drive, installed the 200GB drive in an external enclosure and copied the virtual machines and my documents manually to the new hard drive. I did not go through Time Machine. This also allowed me to clean out the junk from my Applications and Documents folders. So I don't normally see reinstalling as "painful" (although it is), I take it as an opportunity to clean up. After all, the reason we upgraded from 200GB to 500GB is because we were running out of space, eh? :smileysilly: )
So glad you mentioned that "aside"...because somehow in all of this I was missing the obvious. Just put my old hard drive in an enclosure and opened the vm directly from it. No BSOD! 
. Now going to copy it to new hard drive. You are right, though, re: this vm has been getting sluggish/showing signs of instability, plus getting ridiculously large (200 GB), so cleanup-rebuild is a good idea. At least now I can do it when I've set time aside for it instead of at a time when I have two clients waiting for work from me.
Thanks for all of the help!
