I have not tried Visual Studio 2008 however I've had no problems with older versions (2005 and earlier) when everything is on the Virtual Machine itself, and that's the way I normally keep it. Also I do not use the VMware Shared Folders feature as it has always been problematic in general much less specifically with issues such as this. VMware does continue to improve its Shared Folders feature however I continue to use SMB/CIFS shares instead and typically do not experience the same issues as with the VMware Shared Folders feature. However to be fair I have not used this feature in VMware Fusion 3 even though VMware has made significant changes in its implementation between Fusion 2 and Fusion 3 because I really no longer use VMware Fusion as my primary virtualization product.

That said, I have to say if you are experiencing issues where everything is on the Virtual Machine itself and the VMware Shared Folders feature is not in play then the issue is more likely with Visual Studio and/or Windows itself.

So to be clear if you create a project and all files are contained on the guests filesystem and no references of any type are pointing outside of the guests filesystem you still have issues? If the answer to that is yes then as I have previously stated then the issue is more likely with Visual Studio and/or Windows itself.