Yes, that all works fine, and is what I've had to do up to now.
I tried setting the Windows registry entries for PreFetch and SuperFetch, but that didn't seem to help.
I also tried creating a config.ini file with vmmon.disableHostParameters = TRUE which did allow me to start a VM with 8GB of RAM, but then caused a core dump with this message:
2013-03-08T19:46:51.891+11:00| vcpu-0| I120: Msg_Post: Error
2013-03-08T19:46:51.891+11:00| vcpu-0| I120: [msg.log.error.unrecoverable] VMware Workstation unrecoverable error: (vcpu-0)
2013-03-08T19:46:51.891+11:00| vcpu-0| I120+ Unable to allocate locked memory. Aborting the virtual machine.