Is there an easier way to set VM auto startup/shutdown parameters, and have them 'stick'? The only method I know of is Configuration->Virtual Machine Startup/Shutdown -> Properties and then you have to twiddle with moving VM's up/down to enable/disable autostart vs manual start.
The problem with this -other than the horrificly kludgy interface ("any order" startup should be a checkbox for each VM) is that if a VM gets migrated to another host, it loses whatever properties you've set, so the VM gets put in the 'Manual Startup' list on the new host. With 2 or 3 VMs, this isn't a huge problem,but with a few hundred, distributed across a bunch of hosts, it's impossible to manage. I'm tempted to write a perl script to manipulate the config files behind the scenes, but that's a lot of work for something that should be more intuitive.