update
If anyone is reading this post, I thought it might be useful to note that I was able to get Tools to work on third try; this made coherence possible; this made connection between VM and Mac OS possible.
Only issue now is flakey app feature in coherence; I think this is a memory issue but am not sure. Anyway, exiting coherence helps a lot in this matter. Will update again if I can get things to work better. but at least the connection problem is solved.