1. Follow this blog post for the install (he also links to the bits I am here) – but don’t worry about his suggestion for the mouse driver since the VMWare tools install takes care of it.
2. Once the install is completed uninstall VMWare tools (they were installed as part of step 1 but not all of it was done..vmhgfs isn’t set up).  You might have to remount the install “CD” by selecting “Install VMWare Tools” from the Virtual Machine menu.   In any case untar the tools tarball and run the uninstaller.  The uninstaller is in the bin directory of the vmware-tools-distrib directory you created.
3. Follow the directions here for getting vmhgfs to work.
4. Rerun the vmware tools installer in the distribution directory you created in step 2.
5. Bask in the glow of a job well done

The fix I tried was to install the Fedora Core 7 version of the RHGB package which fixed the issue (and caused another one…more on that in a second). That fix is located here at rpmfind.net.

In CentOS 5 the graphic boot process itself is glitchy on my Dell laptop (Precision M6300). However it doesn’t cause any problems and I do get the graphic login screen as I should.