OK, this one is easy, but for the sake of the archives, here it goes:

$ vmware-vdiskmanager -t 2 -r winxp.vmdk winxp-static.vmdk
SSLLoadSharedLibrary: Failed to load library 
libssl.so.0.9.8:\
/opt/vmware-server/bin/libdir/lib/libssl.so.0.9.8/libssl.so.0.9.8:
cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Core dump limit is 1048576 KB.
Core dumped.

Of course, strace is here to help:

$ strace vmware-vdiskmanager [...]
[...]
open("/opt/vmware-server/bin/libssl.so.0.9.8", O_RDONLY) \
= -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/opt/vmware-server/bin/libdir/lib/libssl.so.0.9.8/libssl.so.0.9.8", \
O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)

Somehow the VMWare installer must've messed up the directory structure: what is bin/libdir/lib supposed to mean? A symlink helps:

$ ln -s /opt/vmware-server/lib/vmware /opt/vmware-server/bin/libdir

Oh, and for the initial command: disk performance was kinda sucky and I tried to convert the 2GB filefragments into one big 6GB .vmdk, let's see if this helps....