>>My second solution attempt was to launch Xvnc on the NetBSD box, and 
>>start VMware under that. The problem with this (the one I really want to 
>>have solved) is that I can only see anything when the guest os is in 
>>text mode, as soon as it switches to *any* graphical video mode, I have 
>>black screen in the VMware window. This includes VMware's boot screen 
>>which is also graphical. I tried all the possible bit depths for the 
>>Xvnc server, as well as a few pixel formats, all of which resulted in 
>>the same black screen.
> 
> 
> Xvnc seems to be the best solution to me.
> The black screen is a known issue with linux emulation and X,
> this worked for me:
> 
> rasputin@littlebird:/$ cat /usr/pkgsrc/emulators/vmware3/MESSAGE
> ===========================================================================
> $NetBSD: MESSAGE,v 1.3 2003/03/30 04:21:25 grant Exp $
> 
> Since VMware 3.x, there is a problem which might be related to shared
> memory under Linux emulation, giving as a result black screen.
> Unfortunately, it's extremely hard to track down what's going on and this
> is as yet unresolved.
> 
> If you experience this problem, setting your DISPLAY environment variable
> to "localhost:0" should help.
> ===========================================================================

Yes, that has done the trick. Actually, now that you remind me, I have 
also read that (back when I installed vmware, before having the 
problem), but didn't really see the point then. Now I applied it to VNC, 
and it works nicely.

> Once windows is installed, there is a third vnc hack;
> run tightvnc inside the windows VM.
> This fixed a bug for me where vmware under Xvnc
> bitched about not knowing my screen resultion, keyboard type, etc.
> 
> vnc inside the vm didn't seem to mind...

Yes, that's something I also planned to do, and now it works here too. 
But I wanted access to the "console" of the guest OS too, so I needed 
the Xvnc thing to work well in addition to having "direct" VNC access to 
the guest OS.

thx again, now all my related problems are solved
mortee