Chris G wrote:
For me one of the major disadvantages of this approach is that when the kernel gets updated (which is quite frequently) I have to recompile both my Nvidia display drivers and Vmware.
FOSS answer: Move to open source alternatives that don't have that problem! Intel have released their drivers, ATI are heading that way. And there are open-source alternatives to VMWare.
Pragmatic answer: Ubuntu has the Nvidia drivers in its repositories so they're not an issue; they usually keep pace with the Kernel updates and on the odd occassions where they haven't (I think I've only seen that when playing with pre-release versions) their dependencies prevent the kernel getting updated.
VMWare had a similar solution in Ubuntu 7.04; the kernel modules were in the repositories, and the server package itself was in Canonical's "commercial" repo. This seems to have changed in 7.10 without explanation (that I've found), so you're back to the same problem you're already used to. In my case I decided to trial VirtualBox over the weekend and found it works just as well (if not better) in many cases, and is in the repositories. It is open source but includes closed source components (its equivalent of VMWare Tools) with the latter free for personal use but trialware for commercial use (I've not found the pricing yet for commercial use, so far I'm only using it at home).
Vmware is important to me as I need MS Access to run our company's accounts.
VirtualBox has a nice feature that allows the virtual machine's desktop to be hidden, so that the applications on it (eg Access) appear more or less as native applications on your desktop alongside other Linux apps.
I've not tried Wine with Access but I assume you've already ruled that out?