We spent several days wrestling with this issue and wanted to post what we found as our solution. Like the original poster, we were trying to deploy linked-clone desktops in View 5.2 and when the VMs would spin up, they would continually loop with the "Invalid Configuration for Device '0'" error.
In the end, we found that the problem was with the VM hardware version. We had created the original VM using the vSphere Client - apparently it can only create version 8 VMs. If you use the vSphere Web Client, it can create version 9 VMs. Ironically, although the vSphere Client cannot create version 9 VMs, it can upgrade them. As a side note, the Web Client also has an option for 3D Renderer in the video card settings that isn't accessible from the stand-alone vSphere Client.
Once our base VM was upgraded to version 9 (shows as vmx-9 in vSphere), this error went away and the VMs spun up normally and are usable in View.
