Sorry to try to bring this back on topic... 
But I see file system corruption as a pretty major problem.
Sure, I'd like to see the hangs fixed, but if they results in open files and directories being corrupted, that's kind of a show-stopper for me.
Is vmware looking at this? Is this the same problem as the cryptic "file system corruption in Boot Camp partitions" that I saw under the release notes at some point?
I'm not a file system guru, but it doesn't seem right to me that, if the OS (guest OS - WinXP) hangs and the machine is power-cycled, files that were open (though there was no i/o currently being done to them) and directories (folders, inodes ?? -- I'm ot familiar with the NTFS lingo) would be corrupted. I may be wrong, but it seems wrong that a system hang can, for instance, corrupt a directory that contains a file that is open (via file sharing), and to which there is no active i/o going on. This may be a pure XP/NTFS issue and not a Fusion issue, but I'm not convinced.
On modern OSes, when you modify a file, the modification goes to the cache and it is not immediately flushed to disk. So if a machine hang occurs in between, your modification (the data), and sometimes other things (filesystem metadata like time of last access) are lost. NTFS is a journalling filesystem, which means it tries to mitigate that problem by using a transactional log. When you say corruption occurs, it is corruption that can be repaired with NTFS's transaction log or not?
Some folders from NTFS (Boot Camp partition) have been shared from WinXP. These have been mounted in Mac OS X (Tiger) using the Go menu Connect to Server.
OK, this is what I wanted to clarify. Your are using network shares. Good. You are not mounting your NTFS partition read/write on Mac OS. Unexpected simultaneous access to the partition from both Windows and Mac OS would certainly lead to NTFS filesystem corruption.
Working in WinXP (in Fusion). Fusion hangs...
You still haven't told me if, when Fusion hangs, you see a Panic line from vmmon in /var/log/system.log 
What hangs exactly? Apparently you can still interact with the Fusion UI. IS it just the display of the VM which appears hung?
I have since been running without Desktop Manager for about a week and haven't seen hangs or file corruption.
That is why I believe the corruption is related to the hang.
Using the Boot Camp partition as a virtual machine can, in a few instances, result in a corrupted Boot Camp partition. Is this the same problem that I am seeing?
I don't think so. The corruption we were referring to in that release not is one that prevents you from even booting Windows.
if there is something else wrong with the file system implementation via Fusion, that's even more important.
There is no such thing as a file system implementation in Fusion. Fusion gets a request from the guest OS (which is the one who implements file system code) to read a sector from the virtual hard drive, and Fusion turns around and asks the host OS (here Mac OS) to read the same sector on the physical partition. If the sector mapping done by Fusion was incorrect, your guest OS would not even boot.
And no, I'm not going to start running Desktop Manager again to see if this is the cause of the hangs. I'm in the middle of preparing a big software release and can't afford the (cycle of chkdsk, lose files,reload from backups) loss of productivity.
I understand and I'm sorry our software hangs like it does in your case.