UPDATE
About a month after my last post about updating to Monterey 12.5, the problem came back with the same error message.
By that time I had updated to Monterey 12.5.1, although it hadn’t caused any problem at the time nor for several weeks afterward.
So I filed another Service Request, and the VMWare representative solved the problem in about 3 minutes. I asked him what had happened, and he said that there was a missing tmp folder, probably caused by the recent update.
I asked him to please outline the steps he took so I can self-help in case the problem returns, and this is what he wrote:
-- Checked the tmp folder for the folder named as vmware-[username].
[Note that he located the tmp folder by using the Mac search function and typing in “/tmp” (without the quotation marks).]
-- Created the folder with name vmware-[username].
-- Enabled read and write access for the folder.
And that was that! Simple, low tech, and effective.
I really hopes this helps those forlorn souls who are afflicted with the same problem but have been unable to find any other solution.