Noel,

Thanks for the reply. I have seen that exact error and was getting it prior to trying one of the suggestions I had received via Ubuntu forums (wrapping the alsa drivers with a oss interface using alsa-oss). I imagine if I revert that change, I'd see the can't connect to /dev/dsp again. That being said, where would I indicate to the VM the location of the sound driver i.e. /dev/dsp? Although the issue with potentially ping-ponging between host and guest for control of the device doesn't sound great, I might be able to live short term with that if I could get the guest working. Hopefully VMWare will solve this issue as I've gone back and seen many many posts on it.

Regards