I installed vmware on another machine today to play around with a few things. Roughly the same setup as with my last set of keyboard woes but different problems this time.\r\n\r\nThe arrow keys didn\\\’t work as they should do at all. The keyboard mappings were obviously messed up as when I hit the up arrow in a terminal in the VM it decided that I wanted to take a screen shot. After checking the keyboard shortcuts defined in Gnome this showed that it had been somehow mapped to be the delete key.

A bit of googling and I found the following solution to the arrow key dilemma :

echo xkeymap.nokeycodeMap = t > ~/.vmware/config
This made the arrow keys function as expected (after a reboot of vmware). Back on to some real work now!