Thanks Bill and all. I eventually gave in and bought the BIAB 2009 Mac. My reasoning is that, if I'm going to spend any energy reporting bugs, it's going to be for my preferred platform. I'm in IT, so I do this for a living; not exactly what I want to do in my personal art time. But if I'm gonna do it, I'm not going to waste my time with a flawed operating system.

So to wrap up this thread, I believe that the problem lies with Apple's USB drivers for MS Windows. It's the only common factor between VMWare Fusion and Bootcamp. I don't blame them really, it was mostly a concession to enable Windows users to get exposed to a real OS. ;-)

Again, thanks for your help.