As mentioned before – issues can arise with a black screen appearing on a Windows 7 VM (64bit in this case) after installation of the VMware tools. One solution is to rollback to previous state – the other is to remove and reinstall the tools if you can. However there may be another issue. In this case I was deploying to an esx 4.0.0 build 164009. Once the machine had been provisioned and then started , the tools installed and the machine rebooted – the problem started.
Despite removeing and reinstalling the tools then restarting and reinstalling the problem persisted. I suspect a compatibility issue so decided to transfer the vm to a newly provisioned 4.1.0 build 348481 host and started the machine there. The machine booted and allowed the tools to be installed and rebooted without issue.
So best guess is that the Windows 7 support was less than robust on the ESX 4.0.0 server