I have had some problems for a while with the mouse interaction on my vmware virtual machine running XP. The problem was that the mouse lost its binding to the virtual machine making it impossible to use the mouse. This is not the way to use Windows I must say! It is possible to crawl for a while but really working under these conditions are not really efficient to say the least.
Googling yet again came up this time with a workaround that really works:
GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=true vmware
The alternative using VMWARE_USE_SHIPPED_GTK="force", that I think I have used at times before, didn't cut it this time. vmware dumps core using that.