VM Ware Fusion - Cleanup Deleted Snapshot Fails - How to get it working again

I *love* developing in a VMWare virtual machine.  I can tweak and break things in the OS as badly as I want then simply revert back to a snapshot or another backup to get back to a good state.  But my VM for Vista is huge and when it gets bloated it takes up even more space.

Starting with VMWare Fusion 2.0 you can now have multiple snapshots.  I haven't found a need for this so when I create a new snapshot I delete my old one.  When you delete an old snapshot, VMWare will cleanup old files that it no longer needs thus keeping the size of the virtual machine as small as it can be.

Recently I had an error occur when VMWare was cleaning up the deleted files.  Ever since then whenever I deleted older snapshots I would get an error saying I didn't have enough disk space to delete older files and my virtual machine continued to take up more and more disk space.

Here's how you get things working again:

1. Copy your virtual machine off to a drive that has plenty of disk space - the recommendation I saw was at least enough free space as the size of your virtual machine.  I used one of the external hard drives I keep my virtual machine backups on.

2. Start the copied virtual machine up so that its running from the bigger disk.

3. Take a snapshot.

4. Delete the snapshot you just took - this will cause VMWare to start its cleanup and since its now on a disk with plenty of room it will be able to complete.  Cleanup can take a while so be patient.

5. Copy the cleaned up virtual machine back.

For me this shrunk my virtual machine fro 56 Gigs back to 39 - big difference!