I had a hardware glitch (apparently chained failure of on-board network card, auto-negotiation on switch, auto-negotiation on larger switch) which left networking on my ubuntu edgy box somewhat randomised. Ubuntu recovered after a reboot, successfully finding the new network card (but calling it eth11). vmware-server didn't recover, and no amount of fiddling with the magic of vmware-config-network.pl would cause vmware to forget all it knew about networking and look only at the current state of play.
In an attempt to erase it's memory I removed /etc/vmware/locations but this caused vmware-config-network.pl not to run at all.
Eventually I worked out that the trick was to remove everything in /etc/vmware/locations other than the lines near the start telling it where to find directories and executables and rerun vmware-config-network.pl selecting all the defaults.
Suddenly everything worked.
