I found this on Hackaday, I can't believe VMWare is giving this away, grab it while you can!
Download the free VMWare player here
Download a free virtual machine here, I would recommend the Browser Appliance since it is actually pretty useful, and the smallest one there (200MB, Ubuntu Linux with Firefox)
Install the player, unzip the virtual machine somewhere you can use (c:\vm)
Try out the appliance, it's good for surfing to sites that are spyware-central and of dubious origin, since the virtual machine can be crushed and re-copied if things go pear shaped. It's also Linux so it shouldn't get whacked like your typical XP box, but the default install is lacking some plugins. Oh well, it's free...
Now, to make your own machines, you can copy the browser appliance files to a new directory, and edit away with notepad and some blank disk images.
Read the rest here, as this is a hack by [Faileas] and the hackaday.com folks and their writeup is as good as any. (Note: you don't have to use SCSI images as they point out in this howto. See my vmx file in the extended entry to see how to use regular IDE images made with QEMU. Why didn't VMWare encrypt the config files? Who knows, more viral marketing maybe.
There are a lot of links to this here, here, and here
ubuntu.vmx:
config.version = "8"
virtualHW.version = "3"
memsize = "256"
ide0:0.present = "TRUE"
ide0:0.fileName = "c:\vm\ubuntu\ubuntu.vmdk"
ide1:0.present = "TRUE"
ide1:0.fileName = "c:\vm\images\breezy.iso"
ide1:0.deviceType = "cdrom-image"
floppy0.present = "FALSE"
ethernet0.present = "TRUE"
ethernet0.connectionType = "nat"
usb.present = "TRUE"
sound.present = "TRUE"
sound.virtualDev = "es1371"
displayName = "Ubuntu Linux"
guestOS = "ubuntu"
nvram = "ubuntu.nvram"
ethernet0.addressType = "generated"
uuid.location = "56 4d f0 2c 64 c6 af ee-05 16 cb 87 ba 9a 7b f4"
uuid.bios = "56 4d f0 2c 64 c6 af ee-05 16 cb 87 ba 9a 7b f4"
ide1:0.autodetect = "TRUE"
ethernet0.generatedAddress = "00:0c:29:9a:7b:f4"
ethernet0.generatedAddressOffset = "0"
checkpoint.vmState = "ubuntu.vmss"
tools.remindInstall = "TRUE"
ide0:0.redo = ""
Somebody whipped up a config file generator for this too. Pretty slick.
http://www.consolevision.com/members/dcgrendel/vmxform.html