This may be of interest to others here.
I have been using VMWare Workstation Player 12 for a couple of months
now to run Windows XP for NB9 and a few other programs that will not
function under Windows 7 64 bit (such as the early CD version of OED).
However I have only today discovered a utility that comes with the
player called VMWare-KVM.EXE which can launch a virtual machine without
the usual toolbar and which allows a single key to toggle between the
virtual machine and the host. It has some limitations such as not
allowing the virtual machine to use multiple monitors but it seems to
offer a much cleaner way of running virtual machines than launching them
from the player or from a shortcut.
Paul