I may have found the "solution", and why it won't work in my case....
See http://www.linux.com/articles/58142 for details, but: sudo lsof | grep deleted .. gives a list of files open by processes that have been deleted, or alternatively sudo lsof | grep vmx .. gives a list of open .vmx files
Given that info I could (in theory) work out the file descriptor information and recover the file from /proc (I won't duplicate the above article here).
However (and it's a big "however"), it turns out that VMWare does not keep the .vmx files open after all, so I appear to have lost it.
This would have worked had I deleted the vmdk (disk image) files so that's something, I guess. Rebuilding a .vmx file from scratch is a nuisance more than anything else.