An old post I know, but for anyone to reads this thread....
To script a shutdown of Workstation guests can be done.
For example on Windows Server 2008 using Vmware Workstation 8 - 64 bit:
C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Workstation>vmrun -T ws stop "C:\Virtual Machines\Suse-Linux\devbox.vmx" soft
Put the above in a batch file, then you can then create a sheduled task with a trigger that looks for an Event ID that signals a shutdown of the host, and runs the .bat file.