So today when I tried to start my XP machine, I'm greeted with VMware 2 telling me that it has expired.

Frustration: Why should I use a program that's going to decide to quit working for no reason? I'm moving off this as soon as I can find a viable alternative. I wouldn't use it at all but Quicken contains my business data for the past 10+ years and transitioning that to something else would be a pain. Why I can't buy Quicken Linux for Business is incredibly frustrating.

Anyway, next frustration:

yum upgrade vmware

does nothing. Indeed, yum doesn't know there is a package called "vmware" installed though of course it's running. After much hair-pulling, this command works and tells us what's really going on:

rpm -qa | grep -i vmware VMware-server-2.0.0-110949 #

Aaaagh... it's mixed-case, then a dash, then "server" -- but don't give yum anything past the second dash or it will get all confused again. Just as brain-damaged as 'man' telling you:

SEE ALSO apropos(1), whatis(1), less(1), groff(1), man.config(5).

but when you try to ask for one of those pages you are greeted with the obnoxious:

$ man less(1) bash: syntax error near unexpected token `('

and you actually would have to type:

$ man 1 less

which is NOT what the manpage told you at all. It should have said: See also: 1 man, 1 less, ...etc...

Anyway back to the issue... after downloading the new .rpm, do an rpm -Uvh on it... then

/etc/rc.d/init.d/vmware stop /usr/bin/vmware-config.pl /etc/rc.d/init.d/vmware stop

Yes, you must reconfigure the vmware server... things may have changed, let it do its magic.

Finally as to the problem of arrow keys not working: see this post: VMWare and the fubar keyboard effect

Basically, vmware gets confused by trying to remap the X keyboard. In your /etc/vmware/config, add the line:

xkeymap.nokeycodeMap = true

and that should restore the arrow keys. If not, you can always turn NumLock off and use the arrow keys on the numeric pad. (A bit of a pain when using accounting software!)