Hmm... FWIW, I just upgraded from VMWare Server Beta (whatever version was around last week) to the full release, and it seems noticeably faster when writing out from the Windows VM to the Linux host via Samba. It's still not quite as fast as doing it locally - perhaps a 50% performance hit? - but acceptable. Maybe it's the deactivation of the debugging lines, maybe I did something different this install. I'll have to try playing movies again.