A similar issue just happened to me with my Nikkor AF-S DX VR 18-200mm but instead of not getting below 0.9m, mine was a bit higher. My lens had been in storage for several years due to the fact that I basically moved to full-frame D600 and as such, I had really no need to use that lens along with my D7000. Today, I was forced to press the lens and the D7000 back into service and found the problem. The lens worked perfectly before it was placed into storage.

Luckily I was able to fix the problem rather easily. Recently, I was reading how the initial generation of the AFS 28-70mm f/2.8 lenses suffered from a similar problem where the lens would lose its autofocus ability due to a 'failure' in the lens' focusing motor. The failure was due to a slight bit of oxidation in the motor causing the mechanism to fail. The solution was to clean off enough of the oxidation so that the motor would move freely. Since I needed the lens right away, I didn't have time to get it repaired or disassemble it to clean it myself. So, I vigorously worked the focus ring back and forth between infinity and where the lens stopped focusing. Slowly but surely after about 5 minutes of working that focusing ring, the focusing range of the lens increased to its full range for both manual focus and autofocus.