Andre!
Well.. I solved the issue with your help!
Here's what I did after discussing the situation of my entire laptop with another tech person. On an issue with other software, they suggested that I just reboot and retry. So, I powered down the VM image as a last resort after closing out all of the other open apps/windows etc. There were about 20+. I then did a restart and the first thing I did was to launch VM Workstation with the 'problem' image. I got into the image in about a minute or so. I also turned off the CD & floppy recognition at startup time to reduce that impact, per your request.
So, it appears that the Vista laptop memory even at 8GB was probably fragmented and hence not totally usable for Workstation. My guess is that some of the larger Excel files I work with taking more than 32MB per file may be the memory fragment hog.
At any rate... problem solved! Thanks for YOUR help!
Have a Starbucks on me!! ;-)
I will also run the chkdsk per your suggestion some looooong evening!
Thanks again!