just upgraded to workstation 6.5, and then upgraded my host Ubuntu to Intrepid Ibex 8.10 and everything except wireless seems to be working. After the upgrade of the host, VMWare detected the upgraded kernel (2.6.27 64 bit) and launched a gui kernel module upgrader wizard which compiled the appropriate modules automagically 
I got a warning later about an improperly configured kernel module, but it's not a showstopper, my WinXP guest OS is running fine.
The only issue so far is that since the host wireless wasn't working, so the vmware updater bridged to the eth0 interface, I have to figure out how to change that later after I get the wireless fixed, anyone know how to do that?
I figured out the wireless, there is a bug in Intrepid where the wl driver gets loaded, but it doesn't work and has to be blacklisted, and then the ndiswrapper and bcm43 driver has to be loaded in the proper order, but once I got this sorted out, everything works