Its not a rant its a statement of fact.
Regarding refunds you need to check European distance selling laws and products being fit for purpose irrespective of trials.
I've been a VMWare customer for a long time both corporately and privately - SW should not be GA with this kind of install failure.
I use VMware 5 Professional - this SW is GA I simply bought the upgrade and expected it to work, I don't expect to have to debug it myself I use it to virtualise my business laptop and I don't have the time to fix other peoples problems.
I sent my problem into VMWare support including the crash report and its not solved yet, I cant afford to be down and I dont have time to play digging around support KBs so I've gone back to fusion 5 professional while they figure it out.
Your post is helpful so thankyou for that - This Mac has not had fusion older than v4 on it but I will check the crash dump and see it is the same although for the VMware should be paying you.