Are you running into the issue where you click VM->Guest->Install/Upgrade VMware tools? I have found that if I try creating a VM with the VMXNETv3 adapter and am using an older version of Windows, the DVD drivers aren't picked up properly and VMware tools won't install.

That being said, the only way I have found to get things working is to manually install VMware tools... yep! You VMware does offer the ability to download any version of VMware tool's ISO files.
Head on over to http://packages.vmware.com/tools/esx/index.html and download the version you would like and simply mount the tools as you would with any other disk. For whatever reason, mounting the disk manually by clicking on the "Disk with a wrench icon" and selecting an ISO connected to my local machine, seems to work and gets me back in business.

Hope this helps!