Broken FOG, VMware Workstation 8, Converter Standalone 5.0.1, ESXi

hey guys hopefully some of you may be able to help with this.  I've been searching for a fix for a few days with no avail!
I built an Ubuntu (12.10) FOG server on my desktop using VMware Workstation 8.0.4
I was get errors and eventually all connecting clients (WIN7, Dell  Precision T1650) would get the snow screen.  I wanted to roll-back the  kernel to 2.6.35.7 KitchenSink, though I eventually went with  3.5.0-17 because I'm a noob and couldn't get the older kernels using the following command:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kernel-ppa/ppa

now that I have rolled-back to the 3.5.0 kernel I was able to get a Win7  machine (built with Workstation 8, both win7 & FOG vm's on same  host) to go through quick and full registrations but errors out at the  very end with:
Hard disk not found!
I figure this is because it's a VM and that's why it wasn't working.
At the time I decided to migrate my FOG VM to back-end server and trying it on a lab that we have built in to our production.
When I used VMware Converter Standalone 5.0.1 to transfer VM from my host to ESXi server (5.0) FOG  magically seemed to lose all of its configs.  when entering the  following to check my configs I find a COMPLETELY BLANK document:
gksu gedit /var/www/fog/commons/config.php

at this time, I hand jammed the old config into the config.php file and saved.  reboot.  try FOG again, and NOTHING!

Has anyone run into a similar issue?
I've only been working with Ubuntu and FOG for about five weeks, so i'm  still a noob--though I have come quite a ways in a short period of time.

I would really appreciate any insight!  Thx!