Problem:
Recently I was creating a c# windows service which interacted with VMware machines.
When trying to start up a VM by calling VMrun.exe i got the error message
I found this by piping the response to a text file.
This is how it was solved:
To get around this I changed the command i was using to not use the GUI (nogui) option.
The only thing you need to consider is that running VMs will not be controllable by your manual login/UI as they are running via different process.
Full command line details are available here:
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vix162_vmrun_command.pdf