VMWare: Cannot find a valid peer process to connect to

I started getting this error “Cannot find a valid peer process to connect to” when attempting to resume a suspended virtual machine. For whatever reason, this happened after a I have used acronis disk director to merge a partition to the partition on which the visrtual machines reside to gain more space. It could be only a conincidence though.
Anyway, After trying a few times to resume/power on the vm and also restarting vmware client (VMWare workstation ACE edition) I closed the workstation, restarted all services one by one and then started up the workstation again. I found the virtual machine powered on (in the powered on list) but not viewable. if I took a screenshot it clearly showed it was running. So, since I could not interact with the machine, I suspended it again, then resumed and everything was back to normal.
This happened once yesterday and once just now. In both times I’ve done the above steps and got the same results so it appears this is a workaround the problem.