I believe the root cause may be tied to running out of disk space. My client was configured to not pre-allocate all the disk space. My IT department rolled out HD encryption, which caused the virtual disk to grow to its full size, something I wasn't prepared for on my host's hard drive. It was a real pain.
Still, I see this as an area for improvement. If I'm correct about the root cause, I would have expected Workstation to suspend and let me know I ran out of disk space. Crashing like this shouldn't happen.