I haven’t been using my Windows XP VM lately, but I had to install a game to review and was having trouble getting the sound to work for some reason. Maybe it never worked before. I don’t know because I don’t really use anything in my XP VM that requires it.

But this game needed it, so here’s how I fixed it:

1. Activate your Mac’s root user account:

From the Apple menu choose System Preferences….
From the View menu choose Accounts.
Click on the lock and authenticate with an administrator account.
Click Login Options….
Click the “Edit…” or “Join…” button at the bottom right.
Click the “Open Directory Utility…” button.
Click the lock in the Directory Utility window.
Enter an administrator account name and password, then click OK.
Choose Enable Root User from the Edit menu.
Enter the root password you wish to use in both the Password and Verify fields, then click OK.

2.  Once you have finished enabling the root account, log out from your own account and then log back in with root user (the username is “root” just in case you didn’t know).

3. Goto System Preferences, open the Sound control panel, and specify the correct sound output settings for your particular setup. For me, I chose “Built-in line output” for my MacBook.

4. Log out of the root user account.

5. Log back in with your own user ID and disable the root user.  This basically entails undoing what you did in step 1.

6. Launch VMware Fusion and check for sound in your virtual machine.

Mad props to these two sites for helping me figure this out:

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/134438

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1528?viewlocale=en_US

gb