I have WinXP Pro SP3 as my host and VMware Player 5.0.2, with WinME as my guest OS. With my guest activated, the sooner I plug in my USB flash drive, I get the following message:
The following devices can be connected to this virtual machine using the status bar of choosing VM > Removable Devices:
Super Top Mass Storage Device
Each device can be connected either to the host or to one virtual machine at a time.
Once I clicked "OK", I went to the menu bar under Player and clicked Removable Devices > Super Top Mass Storage Device > Connect (disconnect from host), Unfortunately, in my guest OS, no USB flash drive icon shows up in the My Computer window.
So, i checked the Control Panel, clicked on the System icon and clicked the Device Manager tab. Question marks appear under the category Other Devices and its subcategories, PCI System Perhpheral and PCI Universal Serial Bus. Obviously no devices related to these categories were detected or installed, according to the system.
So, i clicked on the icon for VMware Tools and clicked the tab Devices. The following message was displayed:
No removable devices are available. Either this virtual machine has no removable devices or its configuration does not allow you to connect or disconnect them.
I had this problem last year with VMware Player 4.0.x. No USB device could be detected by my WinME guest under VMware 4.0, and technical assistance was useless. So. I hope you'll forgive me if I have zero patience regarding my request for a solution to this ongoing problem, one that I thought VMware would have fixed by now.
By the way, VMware Tools is installed, and so is VMware VIX API (no idea exactly how this program is meant to be utilized).