In the end this might not be an View problem... more ESX
I cannot make a stable "clone" of a VM that has more than one snapshot. The clone will reboot in "Windows startup repair " mode.
Of course the first thing view does when creating a pool is to clone the master image+snapshot into a replica.
Once again if I delete all the snapshots and recreate a single snapshot it works.
Not a show stopper ... but I'm baffled.