Thanks for this suggestion.
Unfortunately, when you disconnect the CD/DVD drive from the Virtual Machine....then try to add a new "USB Device", VMWare recognizes it as an optical drive and reclassifies it as such back in the CD/DVD drive section. (I now have 3 CD/DVD drives on my virtual machine!....now I need to learn how to delete two of them....).
It was a good idea....just didn't work as we had hoped it would.
Dan