I "upgraded" from 15.5 to 17 and now having the same problem in Fedora guests.

The PCs with 15.5 do not exhibit the problem but the ones upgraded to 17 do.  I see that you are using 16.4 so this is obviously a long standing problem which VMWare has not fixed.

Uninstalling version 17 and going back to 15.5 appears to be the only fix.