Thanks folks, I understand that shutting it down while the VM's are up and running is essentially abusive behavior. I'm not saying that's the norm, just that over the course of several years, there were a number of occasions where that did happen for one reason or another (and no graceful shut down..battery drops out kind of shutdowns) and i never encountered a corrupted vm disk image that VMWare complained about mounting. (Guest OS, again, is another story)
I'll post the log when I can. Unfortunately I've tried booting the VM a few times and it doesn't seem to have improved at all.
The disk is snapshotted, the suffix on the vmdk that's getting the error is .00004. I'm assuming that's how it gets corrupted, that the snapshot doesn't know what image file to get a block from (?) because some table gets hammered. It just seems unusual (to me) that you can't mount it at all.
I've kind of written this one off, so while i'd be happy to get input on how to get it working again, my main concern is whether or not I should continue with player. I think i'm just going to install server to avoid the question, but it does make me curious.
Thanks
Bob