Found these great sites for shutting down vms by command line.
http://communities.vmware.com/thread/87797
http://support.p2v.net/boards/read.php?1,4521
http://www.vmwareinfo.com/2008/08/killing-hung-frozen-dead-or-otherwise.html
If you look at these links they also describe hung vms. My Virtual Center Server vm was hung after trying to remove a snapshot from a vcb scripted backup. Why the snapshot could not be removed I’m still looking in to, but the vc is back up now and I’ll contact VM support next week.
I found a .lck file in the folder and thought that had something to do with it but realized that it was normal because the vm is running on an nfs datastore. I found this info here:
http://esxvmware.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!ED5F1BBA39EF2CC1!150.entry?wa=wsignin1.0