You're not kidding. I had an OSX VM several years ago. The network stack was broken unfortunately, and I never could convince it to function correctly. Like I said, I'd be perfectly willing to pay cold cash for an officially sanctioned copy of OSX. I may need to look into trying to get a Fusion VM to run on Workstation. I don't know if they work. Wife has a Mac with fusion.
Generally the Tools installations can be backed out and re-installed if necessary. But I don't think you can back out the changes when you "Upgrade" the guest VM itself (to the next higher version of VMware support). I think the upgrade adds features which confuse the versions prior to the features' introduction.