Ahh, yeah you can disable that. There's a checkbox under Security & Privacy in System Preferences.

I'm not sure if you can do this with VMWare, but with Parallels you can have a Boot Camp partition that is also a Virtual Machine. So you can boot into Windows, but if you're already in OSX and you just need to do something quick, you can boot that exact same Windows instance as a VM.

I took Boot Camp completely off my Macbook. After a few months I realized I only ever used the virtual machine. Eventually wiped the boot camp partition and regained that hard drive space.

Oh, also I have a Prolific USB to serial (same as the Tripplite and 100 other ones) and also a Keyspan.

Thanks for the security tip.

I want to do exactly the opposite of what you want to do. I want to ditch VM and use bootcamp only. With my iMac i started with VM and ended up using bootcamp. After 3 years i have only booted into MAC OS once and that was to remove malware from the windows partition. The only reason i have it installed on my laptop is because my boss has the same MBP. He loaded all of our typical software, updated windows and saved the image to a USB drive as a back up. My lenovo died in the middle of a project so i picked up a MBP in Florida and used the USB drive to load windows and all the software so i could be back in business quickly.

My lenovo is several years old now and the new (not the recently released 15" but the top of the line previous model) MBP has no noticeable "speed" difference. Hoping that boot camp will change this. That and the general annoyance of accidentally swiping into MAC or having to switch over to adjust network settings etc.