Felix,
I have disabled the 3D Acceleration as requested, and the boot-time hangs continue. Today, I had 2 VMs running, one Win7 and the XP machine we've discussed. (As a side note, I've had this same issue when booting the Win7 VM.) The Win7 VM was up and running with no issues, but the XP VM locked at boot, which the caused the Win7 VM to hang as well.
With 2 VMs running, there were two vmware-vmx processes, so I gathered dumps from both of them.
Thank you for your continued support, I would really like to purchase Workstation 9, but it's very disruptive in its current state.