In my line of work, I do alot with VMWare virtual machines. Often I'm listening to music with headphones on, working away. However that bliss is often disturbed when a VMWare Workstation does a "beep", sending an ear drum shattering wave of sound into my head. On my laptop, the PC speaker beeps also come through the soundcard, which is also wired into the headphone jack.

Disabling the soundcard or audio from the VMWare settings has no effect on this. The beep is sent directly from the virtual machine to the hardware, and subsequently into my delicate ears.

So how do you stop this from happening? Its fairly easy.

You need to add the line to the preferences.ini for VMWare

In Windows XP, the preferences.ini is located here:
%userprofile%\Application Data\VMware\preferences.ini

In Windows Vista, the preferences.ini is located here:
%userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\VMware\preferences.ini