Failed to get IPC connection

This convenient message showed up tonight on a Windows 2003 Server VM under VMWare server. Restarting the service, no go. Restarting the VM, no go (same message). Remove devices and change the VM settings, no go. Restarting host (Suse), no go.

A bit of looking around didn't help much, but someone mentioned a permissions issue. Here's the log entry:

Sep 12 18:13:56: vmx| CnxAcceptConnection: Could not receive fd on 187: invalid control message
Sep 12 18:13:56: vmx| Failed to get IPC connection

Going out to the directory of the VM, and executing a "chown root:root -R ." did the job. Restarting the VM after that brought it up nice and happy. So the question remains as to what caused this to occur.