I have not tried editing the memsize in the configuration file manually. I assumed it would have been sufficient to do it in the settings manager with it powered off. However, the manual change of "memsize = "12288"" works fine. Wow! I guess this is a GUI bug??? I have no clue how to report it.
Regarding the logs, there wasn't one in .vmware then. I grabbed the only log in the /home/user/.vmware/ location.
:/home/derek/.vmware# ls
inventory.vmls preferences shortcuts workstation.log workstationUploadedData.log
Thanks to everyone on this thread for the input. I learned that the GUI is just craptastic. If you have advice on reporting such bugs, I'll gladly do it.
Now to figure out why my VM guest OSes can't get above 100M/s on this Linux setup. 