whenever Linux upgrades, the VMWare becomes unusable for a month or two until VMWare catches up. To run, the VMWare Player must be compiled with the current Linux headers. If you upgraded to 11.10 and lost your headers, run the command line sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r), Then download the current (free) version of VMWare Player from VMWare.com and install it.