I completed my evaluation of VMware Fusion today and provide this feedback in the hope it will be helpful.
Background: some most capable folk in Apple's Discussion Forum suggested I evaluate VMware Fusion with an expectation that it could solve my problem running XP Mode inside Windows 7 Pro.
My problem is that Parallels blocks the use of XP Mode inside Windows 7 Pro.
One line summary of my evaluation: XP Mode is functionally well-behaved in Fusion... But my single Mac Pro yields unacceptably slow performance, as I explain below.
Specifically, performance on my single processor Mac Pro 5,1 system is disappointing, but perhaps not surprising:
nearly 3 minutes to boot XP Mode inside Windows 7 Pro;
about 6 minutes from start of XP Mode boot to full open condition of Illustrator 10;
roughly 8 minutes from start of XP Mode boot to save (complete file write) of test blank Illustrator file.
Conclusion: Either I'll buy a new system builder version of XP and install as a VM, or I'll live with the operational inefficiency that comes with bootcamp; I mean rebooting and using my bootcamp partition to run XP mode in Windows 7 Pro.
Recounting this adventure in a bit more detail: My evaluation first involved installing Windows 7 Pro with its XP Mode function and Illustrator inside bootcamp. My bootcamp Windows 7 instance worked great; as you'd expect, no noticeable performance, function, or behavior issues with either FrameMaker or Illustrator running in XP Mode.
I then configured Parallels Desktop to run Windows from this Boot Camp Partition. Result: XP Mode failed.
Next, imported Windows and data from Boot Camp into Parallels Desktop. Result: XP Mode failed.
Finally, introduced 30 day free evaluation copy of VM Fusion into my test environment....
Following Fusion instructions, I created a VMware virtual machine that used my Boot Camp Volume.
As summarized above, it's functionally well behaved but its overall performance was disappointing. Actually, it's unacceptable, but I expect this sluggish performance issue has little to do with VMware Fusion.
Next, I attempted to import the contents of my Boot Camp volume to use as a new VMware virtual machine.
Unfortunately, no disk in my Mac Pro had sufficient space to import this virtual machine.
Nevertheless, even though my import attempt into VM fusion was not successful, I expect the performance of this virtual machine would have been disappointing as well.
These observations and results guided me to my "either buy XP or live with bootcamp's operational inefficiency" conclusion.
Hope this helps, and thank you again for allowing me to evaluate Fusion's behavior under these narrowly focused--XP Mode-centric--circumstances.