As was stated in the other thread, you will need to upgrade to LMS 3.0.1 before you can get VMWare support. Ideally, this is what you should do at this point. Rollback your VMWare image to just the virgin OS. then, set your per-user and global TEMP and TMP environment variables to something short like C:\WINDOWS\TEMP, and restart the VM. Then login as a local Administrator, and disable anti-virus software. Then, install LMS 3.0 from scratch. As soon as that completes, reload the VM, then mark the CiscoWorks Daemon Management service as Manual, then reload again. Then upgrade to LMS 3.0.1. Then reload again. Now do the LMS restore from 2.6. Once that completes, set Daemon Management back to Automatic, and reload again.
The same procedure can be used on your production machine. You don't have to do the inplace upgrade provided you've used the wrapper.pl script to capture a backup. You can install LMS 3.0 from scratch, then restore the backup after upgrading to LMS 3.0.1.