vmware won't start any vm's

vmware won't start any vm's I recently took "the step", formatting my main drive and installing Ubuntu in place of Windows 7. I'm not too much of a stranger to Linux, as I use it frequently in work, but this one has me stumped. In the course of setting everything up, I installed VMWare Workstation 9. However, when I tried to turn on my first imported VM, it gave an error: Unable to change virtual machine power state: Cannot find a valid peer process to connect to I wanted to eliminate the possibility of an incompatibility, so I set up a brand new VM. Same error. Playing around with the settings yielded a different error: Unable to change virtual machine power state: Failed to power on '(VM name)'. Transport (VMDB) error -14: Pipe connection has been broken. I have played around with the VMX file and Googled extensively, also tried removing all the virtual hardware I could, but no dice. I am simply unable to power on any VM. Any idea what could be causing this?