I also had this exact bug. No modifiers, Firefox crashing on keyboard input. Running setxkbmap worked for me, so I setup a shortcut to run it with the mouse whenever the modifiers went crazy.
But I recently uninstalled VMware Tools from my guest OS (winxp) and reinstalled using the image that comes with vmware-server (VM->Install VMware Tools). Since then I haven't seen the issue again.
Of note: I am using an old vmware image that I built with an older version of VMware (and Tools).
I also had this exact bug. No modifiers, Firefox crashing on keyboard input. Running setxkbmap worked for me, so I setup a shortcut to run it with the mouse whenever the modifiers went crazy.
But I recently uninstalled VMware Tools from my guest OS (winxp) and reinstalled using the image that comes with vmware-server (VM->Install VMware Tools). Since then I haven't seen the issue again.
Of note: I am using an old vmware image that I built with an older version of VMware (and Tools).