The ANSWER:
The problem was that the special nfsd file system that mounts to /proc/fs/nfsd wasn't mounted. I'm not sure how it gets mounted (maybe rc.sysinit does it?), but I tool the advice from the forum entry and added an entry to /etc/fstab
none /proc/fs/nfsd nfsd auto,defaults 0 0
then ran mount -a
After this the mount worked fine. I hope that someone finds this helpful.
另附:
#mount -a时,出现错误提示:
Error: cannot mount filesystem: Protocol error
解决的方法很简单,到VMware中将虚拟机选项中的”Shared Folders”设置为Enabled即可。
重新启动这个错误就没有了,共享文件夹可以在Ubuntu的/mnt/hgfs下看到。