Thanks for the comments everyone. Here is the rundown of the 3 crash scenarios I am seeing.
In no cases do I see a kernel panic, Fusion error, or an error in Mac OSX. Only the guest's frozen screen or failure to load the GUI indicates a problem.
In Fedora 17, enabling 3D acceleration will only effect the Virtual Terminals.
- The upon entering the terminal, the screen is locked up and displays the last terminal message.
- In my case, the last shown terminal message is an unrelated error saying that GRUB2 can not load the english localization file.
- No key presses cause any input on screen and the cursor does not blink.
- Pressing enter does not do anything...no carriage return to the next line.
- I can use CTR +ALT + F1 to return to the desktop without any issues
- The standard desktop GNOME GUI works fine
Vanilla install directly with Fedora 18 with 3D enabled:
- The new "skinned" GRUB2 loading screen shows with new bitmaps and animation
- The GNOME GUI starts to launch, but never displays a login window
- The bitmap background is shown and the mouse pointer animates with a "working" symbol
- The mouse can be moved around the screen
- The login window displaying username and password is never seen
- Virtual Terminals work fine and I can log in through CLI
- NOTE: These same symptoms were seen when using the new "Fedup" upgrade method introduced in Fedora 18
YUM upgrade from F17 to F18
- The X-server never starts and no GUI is displayed
- The Virtual Terminals work correctly as above
Using a YUM distro-sync is not officaly supported by Fedora to move between major releases, but it tends to work for non-virtualized installs. Here are the Fedora provided instructions: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upgrading_Fedora_using_yum
When Fedora 18 luanches, the new Fedup tool wil be the only supported method of upgrading an exsisting install to F18. Info on it is found here:http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedUp
Hope this helps flesh things out a bit more.
-Wilbur