Hi Marty!
That's not good...
I've never used Mageia before, but I have it downloading now to see if I can reproduce that problem here.
Could you please provide the vmware.log from a run where the guest OS failed to read the Tools disc? I'd like to see if there are any interesting messages there, and also to make sure I configure my VM the same as yours. There might also be useful information in the guest's dmesg or system logs, too.
Cheers,
--
Darius