Upon trying to read an mmCif format file written by openmm, VMD shows this useless error message:
vmd > pdbxplugin) Could not get atom number
pdbxplugin) error opening file.
ERROR) Could not read file filename.cif
I still consider this an upstream problem, and as far as I can tell the file written by OMM is well-formed. Unfortunately, right now the VMD bug tracker is just returning internal server errors.