Well, the only reason that I can think of why you are back to old data are snapshots (as you mentioned in your initial post). The snapshot information which is shown in the Snapshot Manager is maintained in the VMs .vmsd file and if this file is corrupted for any reason, the Snapshot Manager might not show any snapshots although they exist. If you are/were able to access any of the VM's old vmware.log files, check for <vmname>-00000x.vmdk files to find out whether snapshots were present.
André