Comment 82 for bug 195982

Exact same problem on Fedora 9. Definitely not something to do with a particular distro - now seen across different Linux distributions.

setxkbmap fixes it for me.

Here's other details:
$ uname -s -r -v -m -p -i -o
Linux 2.6.25.3-18.fc9.i686 #1 SMP Tue May 13 05:38:53 EDT 2008 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

$ rpm -q --all | grep -i vmware
xorg-x11-drv-vmware-10.16.0-1.fc9.i386
VMware-server-1.0.5-80187.i386