You answered your own question 
The file (preferences) is in your home directory and is owned by root.
You do not have permissions and you should since it's in your home directory
cd /home/glenn/.vmware
sudo chown glenn preferences
If I run vmware as the superuser it runs fine.
However, I'd prefer not to do that. I've reinstalled,
but that did not fix my problem.
What are the permissions on the preferences folder
supposed to be?
This all came about when I was trying to fix a sound
problem - I was changing a package (though I do not
remember which one) so that sound could play from
more than one program at a time.
Any help would be appreciated.When I start to try vmware from a prompt (Ubuntu
6.06) I get an error:
Unable to initialize host: Cannot open file
"/home/glenn/.vmware/preferences": Permission denied
When I check the permissions of this folder I see the
following:
-rw------- 1 root root