Received the following error and thought it was intresting
“A general system error occurred. The system returned on error. Communication with the virtual machine may have been interrupted .”
This KB article covers some of the standard reasons
I would add to this article that you get this same error message if you try to add a VM to inventory (by browsing and adding the .vmx file) if the volume it is on is in read only mode (or in my case the ACL’s were set to allow read only)
Make sure you have read-write access to the volume you want to import a VM from