VMware and nonstandard screen resolutions of laptops

My laptop screen is a 1280x800. This resolution is not supported by the graphic driver of VMware. Under Windows 98, I unchecked the autofit option, resized the VMware window to a weired size, went to the Windows registry (in Windows 98 it's three hidden files called system.dat, user.dat and policy.pol) and changed the Resolution entry (which was something like 966,558) to 1280,800. After rebooting the resolution was OK when I selected fullscreen. However, in windowed mode the resolution does not become adjusted to the smaller size, but instead you get scroll bars. But in Windows 98, networking doesn't want to work. I am connected (webbrowsing, etc. works) but whenever I try to browse the local area network I gt the error: "Unable to browse the network". In Windows 2000, the same trick with the resolution didn't work. The registry entry is also called differently "Resolution.KVM". Before that entry there are different other entries called resolution. But as they consist of complex number series, I don't know how to edit them. So I am using the 1078x768 resolution although it obviously locks fuzzy on my 1280x800 screen. After updating to VMware 4.5.2 (build 8848) I am able to adjust to 1200x800 also with the Windows 2000 guest OS. In full screen mode everything is fine, but when I run in windowed mode and "fit guest to window", the settings are lost from the windows registry and I have to manually edit them, and reboot to be able to get full screen resolution back to 1200x800.