I see lots of people having this problem but nobody ever posts their solution so, here's what I did:
I never figured out what was broken but I simply installed another copy of VMware server on another computer and created another vm with all the same config settings as the broken one.
Next I shut down the old vm and from the control panel I removed the vm from inventory to detach the virtual disk, then copied it (virtual hdd only) to the new server's vm folder where the new "blank, empty" virtual disk was located.
I started the new server console and added the new virtual disk to inventory then started the new vm - voila! - the console works now and I can login, update, move to new domain, etc.
Hope this helps someone. Took awhile to figure out, and left me loving Hyper-V