
If you have a mixed network like I do sometimes you have to compromise. At my job we run Windows, Linux and a sole Mac (Graphics dept.) and lets face it, when you do consulting work and if you design and develop custom applications you have to be able to develop for your clients platform and as much as I hate it, it's a Windows world. Before I used to have 2 workstations, one Windows and one Linux, or I had to dual boot. In the past, virtual machines have been lacking. Either they were too slow or lacking a certain pizazz to get the job done. Enter
VMWare Workstation 4.
RedHat does something in their kernel that resets the nice level of root-owned processes that access hardware directly. This makes X niceness automatically set to -10 which improves the GUI response. It also messes up VMware.
To fix it while still running a RedHat kernel, run VMware with nice -1 vmware.