You lost me (not unusual). I'm new to VMWare. How do you tell it to use the iso as the cdrom? Can you walk me through this? (off-line of course).
Put the iso in some location that makes sense. Edit the properties of your vmware machine, and then select the cdrom. The options should let you change it from a physical drive (the default) to an iso, where you'll be required to point it to the specific file.