The guy in the cubicle next to me says that it is possible to talk to a USRP from inside a vmware player using my USB1.1 patch for the USRP library. It is to early to tell if you can do anything useful from vmware, but he did successfully run the tx and rx programs.
Hopefully, we can use this to test the patch to Eric and Matt's satisfaction. Their concerns center around moving a USRP between USB1.1 and USB2.0 hosts. I'm attaching the patch just in case anyone else would like to play with it.
usb11.patch