You don't actually need to shell out for VMWare Workstation to make VMs. I can't really afford $175, so I use a hack - you can create VMware format disk images with qemu, an open source PC emulator bundled with most Linux distros and available for Windows - qemu-img create -f vmdk filename.vmdk 10G (for a 10GB disk image). Then you can create a VM in a text editor - that's all a VMware VM really is, a text configuration file named something.vmx. The file format is documented in several places easily searchable by Google. I have a base template; every time I want a new VM I just change a few lines in it, create a new disk image, and boom, the new machine is up and running. It's probably quicker and easier than the official front end once you're used to it, actually (I dunno for sure, never seen it, that $175 problem).

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