VMWare shared folders not working, vmware-tools issue?

I'm having trouble getting VMWare to enable shared folders between the host and vm as every time I try to enable it, I get the following error dialog:

VMWare Player
Unable to update run-time folder sharing status: Unknown error.

I'm running ubuntu 12.04 on the VM. I've read that it is likely a VMWare Tools issue, but I've reinstalled countless times now as root, guest, my account, and still no luck. I ensured that I had done apt-get on the prerequisites of gcc, build-essentials and such, but still to no avail. A couple of times after reinstalling VMWareTools the error dialog did not appear, but even when a shared folder was added it did not appear in the /mnt/hgfs/ directory.

Any help would be greatly appreciated as to potential causes/solutions.


System Info:

Windows 8 x64 Host, Ubuntu 13.04 Guest VMware Workstation 9.0

I faced the same problem here but following code helped me get the shared folders from host:

sudo apt-get install linux-source
sudo apt-get install open-vm-tools

Just keep on pressing Enter for all defaults and then do this at the terminal

mount -t vmhgfs .host:/ /home/user1/shares

here user1 is your username and shares is where your shared folders would be displayed. If this doesn't work try omitting shares from above command.