Thank you for the reply, WoodyZ. Unfortunately, the items listed in the KB do not resolve my issue (manually reinstalling & removing library files + repairing disk persmissions). Trying to create a brand new VM yields the same errors on first startup. Again, I think it's an enviroment issue.
Somewhere in my enviroment, there exists VMware data/settings that persist after a manual uninstall. This data goes beyond what's listed here http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1017838
I've manually deleted all these files, restarted and upon a reinstall (and an additional restart), Fusion still somehow remembers the name of the last virtual machine I had in my virtual machine library. How is this possible? Again, there is data/service that is in corrupted/malformed which is not corrected during the reinstall process.