Thank you very much André for looking in to this. WoodyZ was kind enough to spend two hours of his time walking me through the process this morning.
In short, in my particular situation, I duplicated the VM to another drive, then had recovered the missing file that VMWare was looking for but it was invalid. One approach was to get the VM bootable without it and see if any data was missing or if I could work with what I had. In trying that, I edited the .vmx file that is inside the .vmwarevm package file that is my 80 GM VM of 10.8.3.
In doing that, I changed this variable:
scsi0:1.fileName =
to the name of the disk that was not missing, booted it and as it turned out, the most recent files that I worked on were there, and it was good enough.
From there, we proceeded converting the disk into 2 GB files to reclaim space and followed the rest of WoodyZ's instructions, before copying the fixed VM back to my SSD.