"If "F17" means Fedora 17, you may be running into a different problem, which is that Workstation 9 doesn't work with Linux kernels 3.5 and later. I believe there is a patch in Re: vmplayer-5.0.0 terminates immediately after start."
I believe you may be correct-although it was the the underlying architecture that was the problem. I have 32 bit CentOS 6.3 running just fine now. I had to drop all the way down to Workstation 7.0.1 just to install Workstation and run 32 bit VMs (I know that without the VT extensions 64 bit VMs were not going to run on this systems). This Pentium 4 Xeon system, although having gobs of RAM, does not have the CPU features that Intel based systems need to run even binary translation in VMware Workstation versions later than 7.x. I'm sure it's a check the installer does since I'm not aware that it uses VT or DEP for 32 bit VMs. This is the last Intel based system I have (aside from my laptop) and will be chucking it next year for an Opteron based Workstation like my other systems. I was just shocked when I couldn't even run 32 bit VMs on WS8.