There was an great session at the Merrimack Valley Linux User Group meeting on Thursday night. Shawn K. Shea presented VMWare and he had a lot of great pointers — hope to have a link to his slides soon. One that really caught my attention was a trick to run a dual-boot partition as a VMWare session, a great feature if you just need to run a transient app, so you can avoid the overhead of rebooting. The howto is here, but it's not for the faint of heart:
http://news.u32.net/articles/2006/07/18/running-vmware-on-a-physical-partition
Read the instructions carefully. There are several “this could destroy your parition if you're not careful” cautions along the way — I'd make a good Ghost / partimage backup before trying this.