Let me walk through the process as we expected it to work, and please let me know if your experiences differed.
1) You install Vista on the Boot Camp partition. By default, Vista is set to activate automatically after installation. Apple's Boot Camp drivers are installed, and Vista is activated.
2) Fusion is installed under OS X. (Steps 1 and 2 may occur in either order).
3) You run Fusion and slect the Boot Camp partition. On the first run, there's a short delay while necessary drivers are installed into the Vista partition. These support the virtual hard disk, mouse and keyboard but have nothing to do with activation. The virtual machine boots into Vista, and VMware Tools are installed.
4) At this point, Vista will start complaining that it needs to be (re)activated, because the hardware it sees is significantly different than it was at initial activation. Depending on the version of Vista you have, and things like volume licensing, the activation can be done automatically over the Internet or you may have to call Microsoft for a key. I haven't done this myself, but I've seen reports from others on the forum that have done so, explained what they were doing (that you are running on the same machine may be significant) and obtained a key. You type that key into the activation wizard, while running under Fusion, and Vista is now activated for the VM.
5) What VMware Tools will do is keep track of the activation keys for running as Boot Camp or in a virtual machine, so that Vista (or XP) sees a match beteen the activation data and the current hardware mode. No further activation will be necessary.
It also works if you do things in the other order, activating first in a virtual machine and then later under Boot Camp, but Tools are required to make the activations valid across mode switches.
We do this to comply with Microsoft's licensing requirements while trying to make it as seamless as possible to run your Vista partition in a VM. We understand that people will want to boot back into Boot Camp to run OpenGL apps or for some gaming. But Fusion doesn't contain any "cracks" to the activation process, and that won't be something we would change.
Apart from the single phone call to Microsoft support for the key, we think we've taken the process as far as we can reasonably go. Are your experiences different from what I've outlined before? If there's any bug in our software, I'm anxious to work with you and get it resolved.
