VMware Server weirdness

Virtual machine working flawlessly on my PC, but adding the same image on another machine fails with some unrelated log entries:
...\VMware\VMware Server\hostd-0.log


[xxxx 'Vmsvc' 8376 info] Foundry_CreateEx failed: Error: (4002) Cannot read the virtual machine configuration file[xxxx 'vm:C:\Virtual Machines\xxx\xxx.vmx' 8376 info] Failed to load virtual machine.
[xxxx 'vm:C:\Virtual Machines\xxx\xxx.vmx' 8376 info] Failed to load virtual machine. Marking as unavailable: vim.fault.InvalidVmConfig

The difference is in the default system locale, which is reflected in .vmx and(!) .vmdk:

machine 1: 

.vmx:

.encoding = "windows-1251"

.vmdk:

ddb.encoding = "windows-1251"

machine 2 .vmx:

.encoding = "windows-1255"

.vmdk:

ddb.encoding = "windows-1255"

VMware server version: 2.0, running on Windows XP/Windows 7

Hint:

Editing .vmdk file is not trivial on windows, most editors will fail to handle multi gigabyte files, you can use biew/beye utility for this.