I have Mac OS X 10.6.3 and VMWare 7.1. Trying to run the OS X doesn't work - shortly after booting VMWare announces the machine's death with this pop-up message:

The CPU has been disabled by the guest operating system. You will need to power off or reset the virtual machine at this point.

The console has a more interesting announcement:

The real-time clock was not properly initialized on your system!

With a dump of the detected CPU speed (~2.9 GHz), FSB (~94 MHz) and bus ratio (31). Somehow, the code that panics is documented in an accidental .diff file here. Apparently, it commits seppuku if the bus ratio is greater than 30. I underclocked my E6500 to a slower speed, but this apparently didn't make any difference.

I can think of two possibilities right now:

1. The CPU info being read is constant, and defines the maximum ability of the CPU. In which case it appears I'm screwed.
2. VMWare presents its own CPU info to the machine, which I can perhaps somehow change. If so, how?

If these sound completely off, that's because I'm a real newbie in these matters. Here's hoping you guys can show me the light :-)