VMware Player 12 free consuming too much CPU after power down

Question

I'm a MU Online Player and it's very common for us to player multiple accounts at the same time using virtual machines. For that I have been using VMware Player 12 for quite some months now with relatively no problem.

Yesterday I decided to try run a 3rd VM, all of them using Windows XP, and I did with success. I was able to play in all three VMs, surf the web and do stock market backtesting using MetaTrader 5 at the same time with good performance.

Unfortunately after a storm I was hit by a power loss and all energy went down shutting down my PC with all 3 VMs connected.

After power came back, I was able to open my VMs again, but this time always when I opened the 3rd Mu Client, everything would go laggy to the point of total VM freeze (the main computer is still usable even though also laggy).

Trying to reverse the problem I 1) reinstalled VMware player, 2) deleted and re-created all 3 VMs in the exact same configuration, 3) run AVG PC Tunner to check for registry and none of these helped.

Running Process Explorer I could notice that what happens is that shortly after opening the 3rd MU Client, suddently at least 2 VMs start consuming tones of CPU (40-50% when the normal is 20-30%), killing performance. I just don't know what could be causing that since no configuration changed was made.

So what could have happened in my PC thanks to this power loss and how could I solve this problem without formatting my drive?

• EDIT *

Good news: I was able to counter-measure the problem with what was my last hope. In VMware Player we may choose how many CPU cores a given VM can use. Normally I would use only one, but when I was going to create the 3rd VM I did a research on the web on how to optimize with VMPlayer and one of the suggestions was to make available all CPU cores. So I changed all VMs config to 4 cores and, as mentioned above, everything run fine till the power loss event. Now I changed back the config to only one CPU core in all VMs and everything is running as fine as ever.