Not too long ago I had a problem updating my virus definitions on a VMware virtual machine.  When I tried to update my Symantec virus definitions on my virtual machine, I kept getting an error message saying my machine could not access a long-named vmdk file.  It said if this file was on a remote computer, I should check my connection, and if it was not, I should check my hard drive (or something along those lines).  The message gave me the option to Retry, Abort, or Continue.  Retry and Continue both made the same error message pop up, and Abort shut my vm down (without deleting some lck files, preventing me from restarting my vm until I manually deleted those).  I tried running different versions of VMs (XP and two Windows 7 machines) and got the same error.   I also didn’t get the error when running Microsoft Updates…only Symantec LiveUpdate.  I had to reinstall VM Workstation to get it to work and I haven’t gotten that error since.