Chrome for Linux is (NOT!) killing my VMWare Workstation Virtual Machine in Ubuntu 9.10

--=LATEST=--
Well, all seems to be okay now running Win7 in VirtualBox OSE w/ the Sun VirtualBox Guest Additions and trimming down the RAM to 1GB.  So my problem is either:

a) 2GB RAM (out of 3.8GB) is too much RAM for Linux to give up
b) 2GB RAM is too much for VMware Workstation to manage
c) I have a bad RAM stick

So, after bumping my Win7 VM up to 2048MB RAM (and even installing Google Chrome, lol) the same sluggish host performance has not been found.  The performance of the VM is not awesome... but I have compiz on, some 16 FireFox tabs, shoutcast streaming techno music.  So, we're at about where we should be and I can rule out  a)  &  c)  as the culprits to my issue.

But I'll say one thing, Linux runs nicer off an SSD than Windows (even Win Se7en!!) and I haven't even tweaked it... ahh, nice to have a fresh copy of Karmic Koala anywhoo...

--=ORiGiNaL=--
VMware Workstation 7 running on 64 bit Ubuntu 9.10 host with Windows 7 x64 Ultimate as guest.

Win7 crawling at a snails pace -- so slow, it was making my PC useless.  I couldn't decide if it was the SSD drive I had installed W7 onto (via "Physical Disk" method) or what (well, true, there does seem to be a huge performance problem with using the OCZ Core 32GB SSD drive with the virtual machine) -- but after some troubleshooting, I found that it only became unbearable when Google Chrome was running.  Odd.

Thing is, I don't know enough about memory leaks or Linux itself to troubleshoot much more than this... all I can do is not run Workstation at the same time as Chrome.  That's okay, my FireFox was feeling neglected.

I can say this:  With VMware Workstation 6.5 and Ubuntu 9.10 with win7 guest, it was still exhibiting the same issues..  this is why I upgraded to Workstation 7 -- but that did not do it.  So, my thought is that it's Chrome.  Although, my old XP guest seems to not cause this kind of issue -- really at a loss on this one.

Anyone have thoughts or similar experiences?  I could not find much research on the interwebs about it.

--=UPDATE=--

okay, I went ahead and reconfig'd everything and installed Linux on the SSD and made a software raid stripe to house the Win7 VM -- system crawling again.  What the hell?  I didn't even install Chrome yet!!

Specs:
Asus P5B-vm
4GB 800Mhz RAM
Intel Core2 Quad Q6600 @ 2.4Ghz
2x 80GB WD
1x OCZ Core 32GB SSD

VM gets 2x Processors (1x Core), 2048GB RAM and a 40GB Pre-allocated vmdk virtual disk on a EXT4 partition on top of a 1MB cluster'd stripe array (across the 2x 80's)

ARRRRGGGH