When I went through the logs it looked like the hold-up was the vmrun command.
I found that the way it was trying to run it was incorrect for Workstation 9-- in that for workstation 9 it needed the "T" and ws command like this:
vmrun -T ws "name of provision file.vmx"
it was trying to run it without that and it would not run. So, when I hit it and made the vm start up it provisioned it and I got much further along. In fact, I think it finished setting the entire thing up but for some reason it hung on the VMwarestudio.. maybe because it was expecting that command to come back.
(because I had marked the "advanced" save build it was not deleted as it was marked as "failed")
I was able to take the resulting build and it booted right up with a menu and everything..