With every change of kernel, a re-installation of VMware becomes necessary and my move to Ubuntu "Hardy Heron" 8.04 was punctuated by the same activity. However, the advent of the 2.6.24.x kernel meant that my usual means was no longer successful so a new approach was needed. That involved the mysteriously named vmware-any-any patch and version 116 of this seemed to set things to rights for me. Stopping the installation before vmware-config.pl runs is the best course of action and it will only fail anyway. Downloading vmware-any-any-update-116.tgz, extracting from the archive and running runme.pl using sudo continues the process. It seemed to have worked for me but I must wonder at why VMware seem unbothered by the idea of  keeping up with Linux kernels and C compilers. It would certainly have removed the need for the user community needing to anything about the problems that others and I keep seeing; it’s a very unusual arrangement.