This has "bugged" me for a long time. Most of my VMware guests are configured for full screen mode.
When I login to some Linux guests, the desktop background stays small, and is confined to the upper left corner of the screen. The rest of the screen is black. The Linux guest OS operates perfectly - this is a cosmetic annoyance.
Furthermore, the problem is not consistent. Sometimes the "quarter screen" desktop background appears in the top left corner briefly, and then expands to fill the desktop as it should. I cannot predict when it will be bad or good, but most of the time it is bad.
I am posting an example from Ubuntu 14.10, but I have seen it with other versions of Ubuntu and other Linux distributions. An example from this morning is Trisquel Linux 7.
The problem appears on many Macs running different versions of OS X, and has been going on through several releases of VMware Fusion.
Any ideas of how to eliminate this cosmetic annoyance?