I get this all the time, particularly when I switch back from a W7 VM to OSX.
Fusion has problems with accelerated graphics on current MacBook Pros. Some problems are apparently cured by updating to OSX 10.8.3 (e.g. http://communities.vmware.com/thread/425153) but that doesn't help here. More memory won't do it either, I have 16Gb of RAM and the VMs that cause the stalls are given 4Gb each. The only cast-iron work around I've found is, as you say, to turn off hardware accelerated graphics on the VM, although I find that if I don't use Chrome in the VM then it doesn't stall quite so often.