I might be late to the game but I ran into a similar issue. I am using my vCenter/vSphere environment to build my reference machine. I then copied that machine over to my workstation (where SmartDeploy is installed) to import as a reference machine. After some troubleshooting, I noticed that because I had downloaded and copied the files from my vSphere environment, my workstation was treating the files as potentially bad. I had to view the properties of each of the files I downloaded and "Unblock" my system from not trusting the file.