Posted from an email from Michael Kedzierski. The compilation of vmxnet breaks on kernels version 2.6.22 or above due to a kernel api change. I found a working patch for this issue at http://www.tuxx-home.at/archives/2007/08/08/T15_42_29/ I took that patch, stripped the leading path component from the filenames within the patch, renamed the patch to the 000_all_foo.patch convention, and dropped it in vmware/app-emulation/vmware-workstation-tools/files/patches/vmxnet and it works fine. The only issue I see is making the patch only apply on kernels which are 2.6.22 or above, as it will probably break on older kernels. I'm not sure how to do this. I've attached my version of the patch.
Created attachment 130317 [details, diff] Michael's patch
Please try out the new open-vm-tools and see if those work out. They're open source and should work all the way back to workstation 4.5. We'd like to get as many people testing them as possible, so that we can move to them and avoid all the problems like these. For now I'll mark this as TEST-REQUEST, and assuming everything goes well with open-vm-tools, we'll close this bug as not going to be fixed or something...