Thanks for the write up. The steps described allowed me to install the Windows 8 vm. However, the Windows 7 vm's can not be installed. I'm on Mac OS X 10.6.8 using Vmware fusion 5. After unzipping the IE9_Win7 image (with unarchiver) and Adding a virtual machine in Vmware, it wants to start Win7 but hangs on startup. I get a Windows message "Windows failed to start. A recent hardware or software change might be the cause" with the choice to Launch startup repair or start windows normally. Both do not work.

I tried a couple of times. Even redownloaded the images from Microsoft, unzipping again, etc. The same problem.

Anyone else having this problem?