Based on your description: "Now when I try vmrun enableSharedFolders for the .VMX it just hangs and seems to do nothing at all until I CTRL-C out of it?"
My first thought is that your tools might not be installed correctly. On my side, if tools is not installed in a 64bit Ubuntu 16.04.5 Desktop VM, when I run "vmrun enableSharedFolders" command on the VM, the command returns nothing until 5 minutes of timeout, that is, the command gave out below error after 5 minutes:
"Error: The VMware Tools are not running in the virtual machine: /Users/Shared/Ubuntu 64-bit 16.04.5.vmwarevm/Ubuntu 64-bit 16.04.5.vmx"
Could you please try running the command again on your side and wait 5 minutes to see if the command returns the same error on your side? If yes, please try re-installing VMware Tools.