More putzing than should be required, but success in building syslinux.
A lot of yum commands, then having to patch the kernel, recompile vmware tools, disable some selinux security option, entering a bunch of commands barely discernible from an alien language (yes, I knew what the commands are, but load up a dozen or two options on the argument list and...) , and finally I'm able to build syslinux and copy it to the Windows machine to rebuild for booting into VMWare.
Linux has come a long way since when we had to install by building the kernels from scratch (circa 1993 was my first exposure IIRC), but its still a pain to install things except for end user applications.
Next step is to test boot a using the syslinux build I built, then start to modify the mod to allow circular reference loading of dynamic assemblies.
FWIW, the putzing was was all setup of Fedora. syslinux makefile ran first time once all the programs it used were in place.