FWIW, the latest version of VMware Workstation is 6.5 and it provides a nice "Unity" mode. which allows applications in a guest VM to appear as if running on the host system. Since Unity mode and multiple VMs are also supported in VM Player 6.5, you can create multiple VMs on one system with Workstation installed and run them on other systems with just the Player installed, eliminating the need for multiple Workstation licenses.

My experience is that the more RAM the better with WS. I run on a 3Ghz P4 with 3GB RAM and XP Pro SP2 and while it takes WS over a minute to start up, once it is running, there is very little degradation in performance and VMs start up quickly. Having plenty of RAM allows you to reserve a good amount for your VMs to run in and and disallow swapping on the host system. VMs can also be kept running and accessed after closing WS on the host, although I haven't used that feature myself.

For all the new goodies in WS 6.5, see: https://www.vmware.com/support/ws65/doc/releasenotes_ws65.html

askSam is having one of their year-end special sales until December 12, 2008

askSam 7 Standard: $69.95 (reg. $149.95)
askSam 7 Professional: $99.95 (reg. $395.95)
askSam 7 Web Publisher: $750 (reg. $1495.00)
Surfsaver 6.1: $9.95 (reg. $19.95)

https://www.asksam.com/online_sales/catalog.asp?req=holiday08

You can also buy a 5-user network version until 12/5/2008 at $995.00 (reg. $1995.00)

I'm not sure I quite understand what you mean by a CD/DVVD writer emulator.

Nero allows you to write a a CD or DVD image to your hard disk.  In version 7, which is what I use, you just select Image Recorder as the device to write to.

But a much easier option is UltraISO (http://www.ezbsystems.com/ultraiso/) which costs $29.95 and allows you to create and edit CD and DVD ISO images. You can drag files and drectories to and from ISO images or remove them altogether, create ISO images from or burn them to physical discs, create bootable discs, etc.  It includes a basic CD drive emulator, but the images it creates can be mounted with all such programs that I know of.