Workstation 11.1, Shared Folders sort of broken

I upgraded Vmware Workstation from version 11.0 to version 11.1 and the "shared folders" option gives a strange result ...

Host: HP 8460 laptop, 16 GBytes ram, 500 GB hard disk

Host OS: Linux Mint 17.0 X64, Mate desktop, all standard updates applied (effective 29 March 2015)

VM Machine (stored locally): Linux Mint 17.0 X64, Mate desktop, all standard updates applied (effective 29 March 2015)

OS Shared folder:

  Name "HostFiles"

  Path "//home/lewis/documents"

Always shared: yes

Read Only: no

--- Plan "A" ---

Shows up under "Computer" as "VMware, VMware virtual S"

Result: "Unable to mount location. Can't mount file"

no joy

--- Plan "B" ---

access via .... /mnt/hgfs/HostFiles

this seems to work.