Alas you are quite correct, that must have been the case. I normally shut down my VM's in an orderly fashion but I did have a power failure earlier that morning. I honestly don't recall if I rebooted all of the VM's first to make sure they came up clean and then shut them down. I did not however attempt to do any VMware Tools upgrade (yet) in the VM. I strictly cloned it, then attempted to boot it with the hardware configuration set for version "10". This would probably explain why both the original AND the cloned versions were hosed.
Hopefully the instructions I posted will help someone else that may experience this same problem. I went down so many weird paths like trying to change SCSI devices to IDE, etc., that I thought my brain was going to explode. So many sites I found discussing this centered around the SCSI deviceType settings and I felt in my gut that this was the wrong way to go.
Thanks again for your help, Darius. This was a fantastic learning experience. I got to learn all kinds of stuff about grub, the init sequence of starting Linux kernels with various flags, and massive editing of vmdk configuration files 
By the way, is there a posted document anywhere that explains each possible line that could appear in a VM configuration file?
Thanks!
Ryan