My copy of Win 7 arrived so I spent the weekend installing and testing the VM.
It worked fine for a while, then caused the computer to become unresponsive. Trying to boot the VM caused the disk subsystem of the host to freeze for periods of 1 minute or more. Even starting task manager on the host failed. Eventually i tracked this down to a sata reset event due to a failing drive. With a new drive everything started working again. I cannot believe all this trouble should be caused by a normal drive failure; Windows should be able to read the SMART data and report it or at the very least give some notification the sata driver is experiencing a problem.
Then I ran into another problem. Turns out some of the issues I was experiencing with virtualbox, flash videos, and now vmware were due to a problem with my processor. Phenom II's IMC cannot handle 4 x 4 GB at any speed greater than 1066 MHz, and even then my system board undervolts both the IMC and the NB. With the memory underclocked and a little more juice everything started working again. So annoying though ... :-( Turn the speeds back up and no reasonable amount of voltage bump will make things stable.
Now I'm having troubles with the keyboard. Virtualbox wouldn't track the caps lock key properly if other keys were being hit around the same time. With vmware it's the clipboard shortcuts that are unreliable. EDIT 2: I figured it out now. It's related to how vmware loses keyboard focus when the mouse moves. Never had that problem because most (or all?) other programs I've used keep keyboard focus when the mouse moves out of the window. Now that I've trained myself not to touch the mouse while hitting keys no input is lost. Gotta slow down my clumsy fingers ... so this poor 6-core 3.2 GHz machine can keep up!