I have solved the problem (or at least discovered what would work).
1. You cannot simply copy the VM to another computer and convert it. That is what I was trying to do. The only VMware software that was loaded on the 'holding' computer was the VMware Standalone Converter. Not enough apparently.
2. I had to install VMware Workstation 8 on the 'holding' computer. Opening the vm in VMware Workstation 8 was a challenge in itself ! I had to hack the configuration file to get past a file permissions error. That was frustrating.
3. After I was finally able to Open the copied vm into Workstation 8, I closed it out, and then the Conversion went without a hitch (sort of).
I'm guessing that the conversion needs to grab hardware information from the machine holding the vm AFTER it has been Opened in Workstation 8 !
The conversion took longer than I expected. One vm took several hours.
I then learned that the management client only last for 60 days, and then I was limited to hardware version 8 or 9.
called 'free' offering. It took WAY TOO MUCH effort to get this operational. VMware needs to either improve the product or improve the documentation. I lost a valuable week getting this going, and my peers, who didn't have the same setup as me think I'm a dunce for taking this long and encountering the issues I did.
Not impressed.