I reverted to my older Dell E6510 laptop and it was able to run vmWare Workstation + Ubuntu 13.10/64-bit without problems. Then this laptop was reimaged this week with a new corporate Win7 image and now the BAD_POOL_HEADER bluescreen crash is occurring as described before. So it isn't hardware-specific, but related to whatever is in the new host OS configuration.
I stumbled into a solution just now. I found that I also had a smaller Ubuntu 12.04/64-bit VM that was crashing in the same way, so confirmed it isn't actually Ubuntu 13.10-specific. I made two copies of this VM and changed the hardware compatibility of one of them to be "vmware 9", and left the other one at "vmware 10". Well, the one set to "vmware 9" compatibility boots without crashing, and further, if I change it *back* to "vmware 10" hardware compatibility it also doesn't crash! I've just done this to the Ubuntu 13.10 VM as well and that is now booting without incident.
The process of reverting to "vmware 9" compatibility removes the SATA CD/DVD drive as a side-effect, and going back to "vmware 10" doesn't restore this drive (which is reasonable). If I shut down the working "vmware 10" VM and add a CD drive, which defaults to a SATA type, then click "Advanced" options for the drive and set it to IDE, this brings back the bluescreen crash of the host. I thought maybe it was SATA-emulation specific and could get away with an IDE CD/DVD drive, but that isn't the case.
