Comment 36 for bug 263837

Ops, there's a bug that rarely trigger (only with windows guest, while starting java it seems). it kills your vmware session and the vmmon module crashes with a NULL pointer error.

its fixed in the new archive at http://www.insecure.ws/2008/10/20/vmware-specific-specific-55x-and-kernel-2627

make sure you update, if this happens to you, you need to reboot before you can use vmware again or even update the module.

note that the above vmmon.tar linked from the chinese page apparently suffer from the same problem.