@WoodyZ: I have tried profiling with ProcMon a bit, but the data is overwhelming. I only looked at FileWrite events, and it's mostly some log file and index writes. I can capture again and post a link here if it is of interest.
Thing is, I am not sure if I can actually disable some of the core OS logging and indexing functions. For example, I wanted to move the Event Log files to the host, but they somehow don't work ... maybe because the host drive is implemented as a network drive.
Similar case for log files.
The OS just doesn't like core OS bits be hosted on network drives. I guess it makes sense for order of boot up, etc. reasons.
Wish VMware implemented the host shares on a locally-attached drive format, rather than a network drive. That way, it would be easy to push a lot of the space killer files to the host where they can be dealt with accordingly.
@dlhotka: System Restore is turned off.
The main issue seems to be that many minute log files and index activity keeps increasing the reclaimable space size. Has anyone else ran into the same problem?
Any suggestions?