Thanks for the tip on excluding the VM drives from spotlight, and I went ahead and did that just for good measure.
Yes, I did clear the caches and it had no effect.
I still don't understand how spotlight would cause the vmware-vmx process excessive CPU usage, unless fusion is somehow attempting to allow spotlight to "see" into the guest virtual machine? This is something that I just would never expect nor want to happen. If this was the case, this is definitely something that should be made clear as an option when creating a new virtual machine.
Thanks for the help everyone!
