My workaround above got me up and running though. a quirk of the 16.1 update, where rather than the shortcut flagging that the location is no longer valid, or a message to that effect when attempting to start the VM, or just link to it from the tabbed header bar, Workstation just hangs with the screen eventually greying out and then crashing. Then when I opened up Workstation, it opened cleanly, and I could then browse to the VM I wanted to open, and start it up with no issues whatsoever. Then I went to the library section of the Workstation, and removed every one of the client VM references - just the shortcuts NOT the files. When I opened the VM directly from Workstation, by browsing to the new location, it still hung, puzzling me further as it opened just fine in Player.

Then I remembered that I'd done a bit of housekeeping and tidied up my 'Virtual Machines' folder to provide some logic, as I share them with other PCs on my network. I then tried opening one in VMware Player 16, and it opened just fine confirming the config and all the files were ok. I knew they were there, so I checked in the folder, and sure enough both were present. In the log, I could see it was trying to access the two client VMs. I found a reference in an earlier thread that identified the location of the UI logfile, so I had a rummage around in there. After checking for updates, and running a modify re-install from Windows Settings it was still the same. It appeared to be trying to load two VM clients I'd had open last time.

This morning I fired it up, and it hung, with the screen greyed out.

I recently upgraded to 16.1, but didn't see any issues initially. I am running Workstation Pro 16.1 on an HP EliteDesk with i7 and 16gb RAM. This may be completely unrelated, but I have seen this recently, and after some trial and error, I managed to resolve it.

Vmware 16 workstation