brings up the Waiting for Unity message
Works perfectly fine here. Is the default control pannel window size larger than your screen? Install/reinstall the VMware tools.
Well, it doesn't work here. It works if you run it in full screen and then switch to unity, but launching it in unity doesn't work. Just switch to unity, click the Start menu in the taskbar and select Control Panel.
Have done this dozens of times with 3.0 - no "switching to Unity" message.