[solved]Virtual Machine Crashes on Start in VMware Player

Turns out I didn't have to reinstall vmplayer. I simply had to rebuild the modules. I figured it had something to do with the recent kernel upgrade, although I figured the kernel26-2.6.35.4-1 release had broken vmplayer. It does make sense, however, that the kernel modules needed to be rebuilt. Atleast, now I know to rebuild such packages upon kernel updates.

vmware-modconfig --console --install-all