Unfortunately not...
This is a HOST issue even when VmWare is not running - i.e. no VMs active :-(
That article talks about 'When a virtual machine is running...' and the active window, etc. which is all behaviour I'd expect.
If I uninstall VmWare all my memory keys etc. work fine and are recognised by the host as soon as they are plugged in.
As soon as it's installed it seems that VmWare grabs the devices *even* when there is nothing running that might want to access them.