Ross,
That's about 14 minutes before your VM is started, am I seeing that correctly?
It's difficult to say what is happening here. At the end of the boot I see a lot of RPC timeouts for VMware tools, but afaik that is not so uncommon.
Are you running any antivirus or antimalware software in the guest that might be blocking this type of communication?
If I was seeing what you have there then I would probably try to re-install vmware-tools. I might even completely remove it. Eg. like this: take a snapshot and then uninstall vmware-tools, reboot guest, install vmware-tools. Run a few tests with it.. If worse, roll back snapshot, if same or better, commit snapshot.
Of course a full backup is better as a snapshot, but snapshots are very convenient for this type of testing.
--
Wil