Bad key and vmware (it seems)

Folks:

I am running exmh under RHEL-5.2 and everything works fine ... UNTIL I
start a VMware client. I am presently running VMware Workstation 6.5.1
but I have had this same problem with 6.0.X and 5.X.

What happens is that all of a sudden, exmh tells me the keyboard
shortcuts (like 'r' for reply to the sender, and 'R' for reply to all)
are all bad keys. In addition, carriage returns and new lines in the
compose window (as well as backspace) print \r, \n, and \b respectively.

This behavior continues until I shutdown the X server and restart it. I
do not need to reboot the host to recover.

All is well until I do something with VMware, and the process repeats.

I am opened for suggestions and appreciate any help that the community
can provide.

Thanks!

Larry Rogers
Cyber Forensics Team
CERT Program
Software Engineering Institute
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213