I'm eager to hear how this pans out for you. I'm am on 10.8.3 and run different VM's (Win764b, XP, Linux) but primarily my Win 7. On an earlier version of OSX and Fusion 5.0.1 I had great marriage. I could run 2 or 3 VM's and lots going on. No issues. I was impressed being new to the Mac world (Running MacBook Pro Retina, 16GB, 500SSD).
Then I moved to Fusion 5.0.2 and immediately this problems started for me (days later I saw others with similar issues on the forum). I rolled back to 5.0.1 and all was well again. Then came the 10.8.3 update. Since then I've seen my vmware-vmx cpu usage behave badly. Always 25-35% CPU when I have a VM up. The Mac fan is usually humming when a VM is up. This wasn't the case before the 10.8.3 update, these processes appeared to run nicely with the CPU usage on the VM working the same. (hope that make sense). Now the VM can be idle (2-6% CPU) via task manager (with "Show processes from all users" checked). But my Mac still shows a hungry vmware-vmx process. My Kernal_task can also be similarly hungry when I'm not doing anything on my Mac, but not always. As I'm new to the Mac world I don't know if that makes sense but it doesn't equate for me.
Note: I'm connected to 2 external monitors (one via thunderbolt to DVI and second via HDMI to DVI -both Dell Monitor's (different models)). This wasn't an issue on 10.8.x (where x was 1 or 2 - I'm not sure) and 5.0.1.
I've not even tried 5.0.3 in fear of problems. Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
So I do think there is a video issue component to this.
I'm going to try what you've tested... Run the VM's when not connected to external monitors and see if my behavior improves. This would almost ensure its a graphics issue.
Look forward to any updates you might have!
