<p>My automated script for starting and stopping VMWare Server virtual machines has stopped working. vmware-cmd has started raising the error: </p>

<blockquote>
  <p>The ordinal 3288 could not be located in the dynamic link library LIBEAY32.dll.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>I am not aware of any specific change or update when this started happening.</p>

<p>I have found a bunch of other people reporting this problem (or very similar) but no solution.</p>

<p>Do you know what caused this error, and/or how to fix this?</p>

I would have said that something must have updated either the LIBEAY32.dll or another dll that depends on it. You may find some helpful information using the
depends tool
. If you use this to open up the perl.exe then it should highlight the dependency path that produces the problem. You can compare this with other machines on which perl runs.
The ordinal is effectively a function that is expected by perl or a dll, but is not present in the verision of LIBEAY32.dll that you have. The depends tool makes this quite clear.