I was actually trying that, and thought that it wouldn't load the VM i had built, but it turns out I had corrupted it somehow, as VMware won't load it any more, either. Yay.

At any rate, I made some changes and it seems to have resolved my problems. I changed my BIOS to present my (single) SATA hard drive as AHCI instead of as a RAID set, I moved the RAM backing store to /dev/shm, which seems not to have doubled RAM usage, I disabled an unused SATA port in the BIOS, and I added the pci=nomsi flag to my kernel boot options.

I know, I should have done one thing at a time, but I'm tired of arguing with it.