This is a strange one. I’ve noticed that vmware frequently stops my shift key from working when I switch back to other applications (this is on Linux). Finally found a good work-around for the problem, just run:

setxkbmap

And everything is fixed. Magic! Thanks to this thread for the solution.

For some reason, a virtual linux machine running on vmware that I occasionally check in on tends to drop into read-only on its root filesystem from time to time. I assume some corruption is going on somewhere, but the machine isn’t important enough to spend time figuring this out. Recovering is usually super easy:

fsck
mount -o remount,rw /

If you have to ask what “fsck” means, I suggest you don’t do this…

Update: looks like there is a patch for this problem (thanks Dan).