Well, that might have had something to do with it.
In any case, I purchased Carbon Copy Cloner, created a 27 GB DMG of the happily configured version of OS X, copied it over to my Thunderbolt drive, installed VMWare tools on the vanilla OS X image that I had running, created another virtual disk and am using CCC to restore the image to that other virtual disk.
Once done, I'll set that restored image up to boot in VMWare and if it works, I'll move the virtual disk image back on to the SSD.
The goal is to stay in Snow Leopard for everything except Xcode. Mountain Lion is just so annoying, it pains me.
Thanks for the feedback WoodyZ. Good to know about the Thunderbolt issue.