Hi Bernhard, I'm so sorry for the long delay in getting back to you. Somehow I was not notified that there was a new (your) message waiting to be read. The good news is that adding "vmwgfx.enable_fbdev=1" to the kernel command line definitely solves the problem! The system works as expected now. The fix has been tested with 3 different computers and 2 different VMWare versions (Workstation 7 and 11) and everything is good now.
Thanks again for the quick solution! Markus