No need to aplogize - you provide useful data - better than average 
Hmm - I don't understand one thing : your VM seems to use two virtual disks - in your directory you have three
Windows XP Professional.vmdk
Windows XP Professional-0.vmdk
Windows XP Professional-1.vmdk - the last one has no snapshot.
Can you explain ?
If it is an unused disk which is just lying around you can ignore that one. If not - don't use the suggestion yet - we need to better understand it - tomorrow.
Basically I would now change Windows XP Professional.vmdk back to:
#Disk DescriptorFile
version=1
CID=4e4a6361
parentCID=ffffffff
createType="twoGbMaxExtentFlat"
#Extent description
RW 4193792 FLAT "Windows XP Professional-f001.vmdk" 0
RW 4193792 FLAT "Windows XP Professional-f002.vmdk" 0
RW 4193792 FLAT "Windows XP Professional-f003.vmdk" 0
RW 4193792 FLAT "Windows XP Professional-f004.vmdk" 0
RW 2048 FLAT "Windows XP Professional-f005.vmdk" 0
#The Disk Data Base
#DDB
ddb.toolsVersion = "6532"
ddb.adapterType = "ide"
ddb.geometry.sectors = "63"
ddb.geometry.heads = "16"
ddb.geometry.cylinders = "16383"
ddb.virtualHWVersion = "4"
As this IDE-disk is 8Gb or larger you do not need to rewrite the geometry.
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Good luck - if you still get the "parent was modified" - check the CID-chain for both disks again - sounds like you already know how to do that.
By the way - in emergency case - when you just need to get the data out of it - copy to windows host and use vdk.exe against
"Windows XP Professional-000001.vmdk"
This also gives good suggestions on what may still be wrong ...
Good night
By the way - resizing is ok - when you have NO snapshot
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It worked!! Wow, thanks!!! You are seriously my hero!!! :smileygrin:
The only issue is that I'm back where I started- I still need to expand the virtual hard disk 
How can I do this without messing everything up again? Was I correct in using the following command?
vmware-vdiskmanager -x 50Gb Windows\ XP\ Professional.vmdk
I haven't touched anything since changing Windows XP Professional.vmdk to your recommeded setup...
Or how can I add that other 16gb disk I created to my virtual XP?
THANKS SOOOOOO MUCH! Seriously you saved my day, if you ever come to San Francisco, I buy your beers 
I thought you meant how to remove the snapshot disks.
First (after backing up your VM ), you need to make absolutely sure you've consolidated all your snapshot disks before you do any resizing (this is what I was explaining how to do in my earlier post). This will not have any visible effect from within the VM.
After that, you can use vmware-vdiskmanager to grow the disk. This will increase the disk capacity, but your guest will not be able to use the extra space until you either add a new partition in the guest or use a partition resizing tool (e.g. gparted, Partition Magic, etc.) to resize the existing partition to fill the space.
lionstone wrote:
Or how can I add that other 16gb disk I created to my virtual XP?
> If you've added it to the vmx file and it appears in the VM's settings,
> then start the XP guest. And add it exactly the same way you would if
> it was a new physical disk: Run Disk Management (Start-->Control
> Panel>Administrative Tools>Computer Management, select
> Storage-->Disk Management in the treeview. You should see a new,
> blank hard disk. Create a partition on it, and then format it and give
>it a drive letter.
Whoa, great! So simple and worked like a charm..Guess I need to learn how to use Windows, I've been on Linux too long. Thanks, this was exactly what I needed- I'm done messing around with the disk-manager now
Greatly appreciate all the help, everyone!