It's not necessarily a matter of "Lucid has a regression that makes in not work when virtualized," but it may be "Lucid does something *new/different* that VMWare doesn't know how to handle yet." It's probably best handled on the VM side if it can be. So, the best advice is to report this to the VMware developers and see if they can figure out what's going on. I can confirm that KVM and VirtualBox both work fine for me with Lucid, so unless people can confirm this behavior in supported virtualization platforms (e.g. a virtualization tool available from the Ubuntu repositories), there's really not much that can be done here.
It's not necessarily a matter of "Lucid has a regression that makes in not work when virtualized," but it may be "Lucid does something *new/different* that VMWare doesn't know how to handle yet." It's probably best handled on the VM side if it can be. So, the best advice is to report this to the VMware developers and see if they can figure out what's going on. I can confirm that KVM and VirtualBox both work fine for me with Lucid, so unless people can confirm this behavior in supported virtualization platforms (e.g. a virtualization tool available from the Ubuntu repositories), there's really not much that can be done here.