The 2.6 kernel of Fedora Core 5 and VMWare 4.5.2 also fought over the system clock. Specifically, the clock in the Linux guest ran 2-5x slower than real time. This affects everything time-based, including the keyboard repeat delay, which is very annoying. The problem is well documented on the VMWare forums, and there are a couple solutions. First, try the clock=pit kernel option. (Append it to the kernel line in /etc/grub.conf). If that doesn't work, download the source for your kernel, change the HZ constant in include/asm-i386/param.h from 1000 to 100, and rebuild. clock=pit didn't work for me, but changing HZ to 100 did. 1)
I have a short guide to help recompiling a “Fedora” kernel here: