Wish I could help. I confirm this to be an issue.
However the following may help home in on the just to home in on the problem area. I installed the Ringtail version of UbuntuGnome as a fresh guest (running under a Win8 host). It detected and installed vmware tools automatically without issue, however as soon as the guest updated the kernel to 3.8-0-19 it all went sour. Attempts to reinstall vmware tools aborted with issues similar to the ones you list.
The Liquorix version of 3.8-0-13 has similar vmware tools incompatibilities when used to upgrade the kernel of a Debian Sid guest install. Looks like we are back to the bad old days of vmware linux incompatibilities.
btw the problems are even worse if you upgrade from a previous Ubuntu version, as then kernel panics seem to be a fairly typical problem.