Nevermind, I'll answer my own question. It looks like the VMWare images are just Virtual PC images with bad conversions. If you find IE7-Vista booting up slowly or erroring out during boot, check this link:

http://blog.outsidesys.com/2011/03/01/vmware-pci-express-standard-root-port-conflicts/

Basically, turn off the VM. Edit IE7-Vista.vmx in a text editor. Find lines that read like:

pciBridge.present = “TRUEâ€,

and set it to 

pciBridge.present = “FALSEâ€,