Hi ARomeo! Thank you very much for your reply! It definitely helped! It's weird that VMware doesn't document this excellent converter as a solution for a hardware compatibility problem. Anyway, I wish I could say that this solved my problem with running the virtual machine. I don't know if it's that the converter only enables me to convert the virtual machine from Workstation 5.x to Workstation 11.x (and not the currently available Workstation 15). That is an issue, although I doubt that explains my lingering issue.
At issue is constant and ongoing problems of unresponsiveness and crashing that still plague the virtual machine since I switched to Workstation 15 Player, that the conversion hasn't solved. If anything, it's worse. Now, the Workstation Player seems to have lost the ability to run the virtual machine at all. When I try to play the virtual machine, I just get an endless "Waiting for connection" screen. After spending the past two days trying to get the virtual machine to work, I think I'm back to the drawing board!