I blogged earlier about VMWare and Lost Ethernet connections as Emily has her pc running as VM on my dev machine at home. Well recently another weird thing happened. All USB devices dissapeared. Not sure why or what happened, but I had to edit the .vmx file directly in notepad and set the option
usb.present = “TRUE”
it was set to FALSE, but neither of us changed it, somehow VMWare lost the ability to know it could process usb devices for this VM. Odd, but resolved.
Steve Novoselac's Blog 