Yes. I have been mislead by the log entry "Trying connection to VC server" that it is in a vCenter Server.
In this case a workaround would be to manually add a vc.uuid in the .vmx file. The drawback is you will need to restart the management agent.
This is a rare case - VC creates vc.uuid when readding the VM. If you create a new VM in standalone ESXi, it will also create it (since a certain version, think it's 4.0 but not completely sure)
I'll file a bug for that.
HTH
Plamen