Thank you for your thread. I too was having the same exact issue and was losing my mind for the last two days and with pure luck I ended up here. I started a support request with VMWare but whatmyki's suggestion in the post you linked helped me resolve the issue. You need to install the broadcom offline bundle he mentioned, reboot and then try to apply the iso. As he mentioned make sure you use the "install" switch and not update switch or it will not work. I did not use the iso but the zip and I also used VUM so hopefully it works for you.
I think the HP June bundle is buggy and hopefully with enough people posting about this, HP will resolve the issue.
Download this, and inside the zip file is the offline bundle: