These are the steps to use if you are using Vmware Workstation 6.5, with a Windows XP guest, and your PDA won’t sync.

First: You need to find the VID and PID of the device you are trying to connect

To do this, all you need to do is attempt to sync your device.  When that fails, cd into the directory that has the files for the guest you are trying to sync to.  Look at the vmware.log file, there will be a line like this

vmx| USB: Found device [name:Palm\ Handheld vid:0830 pid:0061 path:5/1 speed:full family:vendor autoclean:1]

Note the VID = 0830 and the PID = 0061.

Next: Edit the vmx file for the windows XP guest and add the following line to it

usb.quirks.device0 = “0×0830:0×0061 skip-setconfig, skip-reset”

The 0×0830 and the 0×0061 will be replaced with the VID:PID that was in the vmware.log file.  the 0x MUST come before the numbers so that vmware knows it is a HEX value.  The values in the logfile are HEX numbers.  Also, the number after “device” in the device name “usb.quirks.device0″ can be any number from 0-N but there can not be any gaps in numbering.

Finally: Save the file and then shut down your VM if it was already running, then start it back up, and try to sync your device.

There is currently an issue with Virtualbox and linux guests that have their kernel compiled with tickless timer support (CONFIG_NO_HZ) enabled.  What happens is that when the linux guest is idle, the CPU on the host gets pegged at 100%, or close to it.  SUN is currently investigating this issue, so they recommend that if you are having an issue, then either re-compile your linux kernel to disable the tickless timer support, or add the following to the boot parameters in your grub.conf file, and reboot.

nohz=off

If the problem isn’t fixed by that option, the other thing to try is to see if running the following command resolves the problem:

modprobe vboxdrv force_async_tsc=1

If that works, you can put that in the init script for the vbox driver.  To do that, edit /etc/init.d/vboxdrv with your favorite editor.

edit the following line:

if ! modprobe $MODNAME > /dev/null 2>&1; then

so that it says this:

if ! modprobe $MODNAME force_async_tsc=1 > /dev/null 2>&1; then

This second item may not need to be done, but it has helped people in the past, if the first option doesn’t work.  Hopefully SUN will have a workaround for this in the near future.