VMware Fusion

Based on Microsoft's Retail Software License Terms (select Windows Vista, Ultimate and your language) you can install only Vista Ultimate to a virtual machine. But, does that mean that you can install Vista Ultimate on a Mac under VMWare Fusion (say) and use the same license to run Vista Ultimate on a PC? Also, can you use 32 bit version on one and 64 bit version another?

Most likely you mixed something if there are two Windowses. If you have not installed any software there, why not remove them both and try again? I have VMware Fusion (and it works fine), so I cannot help you more, sorry.

Yes Fusion has some 3D support, check VMware web site for supported games. ...

Damn, I thought I had read that vmware supported 3d gaming. Oh well, thanks for the help guys. ...

while Parallels and VMWare Fusion are excellent at running most Windows programs in a virtualized environment, it's still not the same as running under Windows natively. ...

None. Get a Mac, or use a Mac at your course if they have one. Mac OS X can legally be installed on Macs only - Mac OS X Server potentially will be allowed to run virtualized (e.g. in VMware Workstation), but even that is not official yet.

For 3D gaming on your Mac, you need to use BootCamp. VMWare Fusion (and Parallels) only support games with limited hardware acceleration.

If you use BootCamp, then no, you can't access the HFS+ formatted drive from Windows (without installing this: http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive/). If you use a solution such as Parallels or VMWare's Fusion to run Windows in a virtualized environment, then you can always set up the HFS+ formatted external drive as a "shared" drive and access it from Windows like...

Next time when you wan tot use vmware or parallels you should start that program up first and then install to a disk image. That will let you run both windows and Mac OS. ...

My sister was using my computer and wanted to use Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2 in VMWare so booted a CD of Windows on my machine. ...