Hi John,
Hmm... This pops up once in a while, see also http://communities.vmware.com/thread/392941?tstart=120.
Basically, guest customization fails to read OVF Environment which provides information about what needs to be customized. The command which fails is the following:
"C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Tools\vmtoolsd.exe" --cmd "info-get guestinfo.ovfEnv"
The problem is that the issue is intermittent. From your log it seems like another customization has successfully completed just 4 minutes before. So, it's unlikely a setup issue.
When this happens next time, could you leave such VM running and post here so that we can try to debug?
The first step would be to try to get detailed error message by executing the above command manually from "cmd". We don't log that ourselves, since that command is considered "secure" as it may return sensitive information like encrypted passwords.
/Andrii