As of this writing, it looks to be mis-configured. The keyboard seems to be set up for German, not English as stated. Quite a few key mappings are different between the two. If you know how to configure X, that's fixable inside the machine.
Shared folders work fine for me. I am using Workstation 6.0.3 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux Client release 5.1.
Indeed my home directory on Red Hat cannot be shared with Ubuntu in the virtual machine due to access rights.
But other directories work fine.
On the Ubuntu in the VM, the shared directories are mounted into: /mnt/hgfs
