Workstation 16.1.2 on Windows 11 23H2 host

[RDPetruska]

So, my company forced me to upgrade my host OS from Windows 10 to Windows 11.  My VMware Workstation Pro version 16.1.2 still works - sort of.  I can launch any of my Linux guests - albeit they load EXTREMELY slowly - like more than 1 minute before the login screen appears.  However, my DOS and Windows XP guests merely give an error message a few seconds after attempting to boot "Virtual Machine Failed to Start".  Yeah, helpful.

So - I could upgrade to Workstation 17.5.2 (it seems from reading tons of threads here that 17.6 and 17.6.1 result in unusably slow VMs) which should allow those VMs to run on my Win11 host.  However, I then lose the ability to mount my vmdk files to my host as a drive... and this is CRITICAL for my DOS VMs, as the only other options for transferring files into and out of them is virtual floppy disks - would need to swap TONS of times, and also can't hold large files; or ISO image - but that would help get files INTO the VM, not OUT of the VM.   I have tried to install both the older VMware Mount software 5.5 from the Workstation era, and Ken Kato's VDK.  The VMware-Mount installer runs, but rolls back before it completes (and again, no helpful messages); the VDK driver gets installed, but when I try to start, get a message that it was blocked from starting.  Both of these are not big surprises to me, since they were written 20+ years ago.  Yes, I realize that 7-zip can read vmdk files and extract from them, it cannot write files into them - so also not really an option.

Looking for ANY kind of help here.  As I explained all of this to Michael back when 16.2.x either broke or completely dropped this disk mounting functionality, I NEED this for my work.  And I held off upgrading to Win11 as long as possible, but unfortunately I can no longer do that.  Has anyone else come up with a workable solution?

[RDPetruska]

Update - I ran some experiments today and discovered that all of the VMs which would not start up were Workstation 10 compatible ones (and one Wks 5).  I upgraded the virtual hardware to Workstation 15, and they now start and run.  I get a crash if I try to suspend any of them with an access violation, but I can survive without the suspend feature.  My coworker attempted to run the original VMs on his Win11 host with Workstation 17.6.1, and they run and suspend fine.  Of course, no disk mapping there, so I still don't want to upgrade my Workstation.  But at least I have one workaround solution now.