Brad,
My support ticket is 13272495501. Due to my schedule, we are slowly making headway. I'll be uploading my log files to them this evening.
What I discovered last night, was that when I plug in my USB flash drive or printer, they will show up in the Windows Device Manager under the Universal Serial Bus controllers as VMware USB Device. This would indicate to me that the either my Windows host is loading the incorrect device driver on its own, or one of the VMware services is instructing Windows to load that particular driver. Strangely enough, this seems to be USB port specific - meaning that the flash drive is recognized correctly by the host in the front USB port, but not the rear USB port. I have attached some screenshots of what my Device Manager shows for the drive plugged into the front and rear ports for reference.
When I found that the name of my USB flash drive was incorrect in the Device Manager, I then had a useful (and hopefully more specific) term to search the forums and elsewhere with. I happened across the following discussion (it's short, but potentially helpful):
http://communities.vmware.com/message/1461375#1461375
I have been successful in getting the host to correctly recognize my flash drive and printer in their usual USB ports by right-clicking on the VMware USB Device in the Device Manager and selecting Uninstall. After I remove the drive and printer, then reinsert them, they work correctly on the host. This, however, appears to only be a temporary fix.
Hopefully, you and maybe others, will find this information helpful. I'll be sure to post any further findings.
Good luck.