no, i can open the themes in SCD, i started editing a theme and exported it to the my themes folder saved as .sct but SCC won't open it or any of the others as its prompting for .scc

when you ask SCC to open a file does it show .sct in the files of type window

First you have a few issues here.

1. An .SCT file is your theme file.
2. An .SCC is your project file. This is your shop.

Because you are on a mac using VMWare I bet you that you have your Documents folder shared between Windows and OSX and since themes need to be installed into the Windows documents folder, they are being installed on a vmware mapped partition on the OS X side. You will need to edit your VMware configuration and make sure to isolate Windows from OSX and then re-install the software.

the vmware windows is completely isolated from the osx but i will give it a bash in the morning. Are there any user manuals available yet.

Press F1 to get the manual. There will however not be any information about how to configure VMware or other virtual machines to work with the software.

The error you are getting I have seen before by other Macintosh users and this has always been the case. If our themes folders are not installed into the Windows partition, it will error out exactly like you are seeing now.