VMWare Workstation 8 and OpenSUSE 12.1 revisited

I'm not entirely happy with the configuration above - although everything installs and basically works there are enough little bits of misbehaviour that I am not entirely happy.

• The fglrx drivers for the Radeon cards in my machines seems to generate odd screen corruptions, for example, when a menu pops up. These are overwritten fairly quickly by the proper content but there is a visual discontinuity.
• Workstation 8 is not supported on OpenSUSE 12.1 not does it officially support it as a guest although both work more or less. This is irritating since 12.1 has been out for a bit.
• Automatic input capture in VM's utterly fails for me until Workstation 8.04 (released yesterday as I write!) so I had to use Ctrl-G to do manual capture.
• VM's seem to be able to bog down the entire machine when saturating only one core (and it's not an IO bottleneck). This is not something I have encountered previously. This is really noticeable when installing a VM where the host pretty much grinds to a halt and screen updates become glacial as files are uncompressed and copied. 

So, basically, I am going back to OpenSUSE 11.4 since that does seem to work properly.