I'm posting this primarily as a reminder to me, but perhaps it will help some else as well. I just upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10 beta 64bit, installed VMware 6.5 and my up and down arrows were not working (one was opening the windows menu and some other crazy stuff). A co-worker of mine pointed me towards this handy little fix:
Function/arrow keys, etc. not working
This is an upstream bug in VMware’s code. If your keyboard is not functioning correctly in VMware, add this line to ~/.vmware/config
(create file if necessary):
xkeymap.nokeycodeMap = true
http://www.ultimalinux.com/wiki/VMware
Worked like a charm. Awesome.