I am running VMWare Workstation 5.5.1 and Slackware 10.1. I just ran the VMWare tools script (just have upgraded my VMWare version), but I have had this problem before the upgrade:

If I run X from startx & kde I am having problems with the icons in the taskbar and the mouse cursor icons when opening programs

in the taskbar, when I highlight a program/icon, the icon grows per-normal, but it gets highlighted (background color) in a light gray, not transparent as expected. If I make the taskbar 100% transparent, this problem still occurs (the taskbar is a slate-blue like my desktop, but the icon highlight is still light gray).

When I start an application, there is a problem with the "bouncing icon" next to the mouse cursor (animated icon of the program being started). The icon has a flickering box around it (so the transparent area is all black with flickering colored lines).

Now if I run KDE from my TightVNC server and then attach to it using the TightVNC viewer on my windows box, I don't have these issues (the fonts are different as I think my font path may be different, but I doubt that is the issue).

I've been running using vnc as I would used to connect to home from work, but now I am only running it at home, and wanted the performance benefits of just running 'startx' locally. These problems are quite annoying though and there may be more (I haven't run it in this mode very long at all).