You don't need to downgrade for the whole OS, you can just do it for VMware. See the procedure in the first comment in this bug http://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=3884. I have done that and it works fine. Just remember that if you update vmware, the edits to vmware-hostd will be undone, so you need to redo them.
Thanks for the mantis link, it was very informative.
Cheers,
Dan