I'm so sorry you're having trouble. I'm actively trying to stamp out these 7B errors now, hopefully to be part of some future update to Fusion, if possible.
The most probable cause of the 7B error is that we can't update the Windows registry from the outside and enable the driver that lets Windows boot up with the virtual IDE controller. This can happen if the registry doesn't have existing free space for the new settings (we can't expand it). It's also possible that you have some other driver installed that is conflicting, and that's more difficult.
If you're willing I will work with you to get it going manually. You say you've tried some of my previous postings in the forum, but let's go through them one by one -- it's always possible that you have some configuration wildly different from any of the machines in our testing labs.
Would you go back into Boot Camp mode, and verify the following things:
1) There exists a file c:\Windows\system32\drivers\intelide.sys
2) There exists a file c:\Windows\system32\drivers\i8042prt.sys
3) Run regedit, and look for the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\CurrentControlSet\Services\Intelide. This should have a Start value of zero and an ImagePath of "system32\DRIVERS\intelide.sys".
If those don't exist, run the registry scripts we've posted, in the Boot Camp VM, and verify that they got put in.
4) Go back into Boot Camp, delete the ~/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/Virtual Machines folder one last time, then tell Fusion to start up the Boot Camp partition.
5) The most interesting logfile will be found as ~/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/Virtual Machines/Helper/naos-1.0.vmwarevm/vmware.log. If you're still having the 7B issue, could you post it for up for me please?
