Mac – load a VMWare VM created using Fusion on VMWare Player

Try the Tokamak Networking Scripts for VMware Fusion, they provide advanced networking setup and might possibly do what you're looking for...

WARNING: If you have a Home Directory protected by FileVault, DO NOT INSTALL FROM WITHIN THAT DIRECTORY! It will mess up FileVault (happeend to me once)

EDIT: You might also try this thread on the VMware community forums. An exerpt for you:

After seeing this post by powervm: http://communities.vmware.com/thread/151384?tstart=0

I was able to get bonded nics/link aggregates to work.

edit /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/boot.sh and look for the vmnet-bridge section and edit accordingly.

vmnet-bridge puts itself in background (daemon mode)
Bridge to host network interface 'en0'.
"$LIBDIR/vmnet-bridge" -d /var/run/vmnet-bridge-vmnet0.pid vmnet0 en0
Bridge to host network interface 'en1'
"$LIBDIR/vmnet-bridge" -d /var/run/vmnet-bridge-vmnet2.pid vmnet2 en1
#"$LIBDIR/vmnet-bridge" -d /var/run/vmnet-bridge-vmnet3.pid vmnet3 bond0
Bridge to the primary host network interface (which can change over time).
#"$LIBDIR/vmnet-bridge" -d /var/run/vmnet-bridge-vmnet0.pid vmnet0 ''

Edit the vmx file for your virtual machine and change 

ethernet0.connectionType = "bridged"
ethernet0.vnet = "/dev/vmnet0"

to

ethernet0.connectionType = "custom"
ethernet0.vnet = "/dev/vmnet0"

make sure fusion isnt running and restart it with

sudo /Library/Application\ Support/VMware\ Fusion/boot.sh --restart 

Im not certain what speed im getting on the link in the VM, as task manager states it running at 10mb/s as does the driver. But I have network connectivity, which is all I wanted.

Sounds exactly like what I'd expect if you didn't have VMware Tools installed in the Guest. Having the Mouse become locked into th Guest console is the classic symptom of nat having VMware tools [fully] installed, sub-optimal video, network and possibly disk performance are the others.

However the multiple levels of redirection involved here might also be causing problems. I've happily run the VI Client in a VM running under VMware Workstation on top of Vista on my laptop controlling Windows VM's running on an ESXi instance on another laptop - both Dell D630's so they're not too far removed from the spec you outline above. It works reasonably well for the purposes of testing and I don't see the issue you describe, but then all the user interfaces in my stack are running Windows.