One more thing - I also have an old 2008 Macbook Pro ...
I used Migration assistant to copy everything onto the 2008 Macbook Pro, and hooked it up to the Apple Display - it works fine too.
The issue seems to be isolated to the late 2012 Macbook Pro Retina running VMware with an external monitor.
Apple swapped out my logic board on the 2012 model (so new processor, memory etc.) so it is essentially a new machine - the only part remaining from the old machine is the SSD hard drive - and this has been formatted and re-insalled.