I just spent hours discovering and struggling with the same ridiculous bug. Give me a break, VMWare!
I am trying to use a Snow Leopard Guest under a Lion host so that I can launch PPC apps using Rosetta.
I was really stumped for awhile because it worked for some apps but not others, like Office 2004 and Quicken!
Then I finally noticed the file sizes were quite different on the native file system as opposed to that reported through the shared folder.
The workaround I am using is to disregard Fusions's shared folder mechanism and mount the Host volumes through the guest OS's Finder AFP integration.
But come on, VMWare -- this bug is absurd. Fix this in 4.1.2!