Installation on kernel 2.6.24 is messy , the reason is VMWare is not up to speed to generate vmmon modules for the latest kernel.

I encountered the following error, since I tried to use a latest kernel.
Version mismatch with vmmon module: expecting 167.0, got 161.0.
You have an incorrect version of the 'vmmon' kernel module.
Try reinstalling VMware Workstation.

but before this error you are most likely to get lot of compilation errors which you can get around by running any-any-patch.

so here is the recommended method to get VMWare installed in Debian.

Install the 2.6.22-4 kernel. I had 2.6.22-2 already installed , but could not find the headers to install even in the backports. simply downloading kernel sources and pointing that directory to the VMWare installer will not work ,since VMWare installer expects Version.h which gets created only if you compile a kernel from that sources.
So I simply recompiled the 2.6.22-4 kernel and installed it. alternatively you can apt-get install linux-image-2.6.22-4-686 which will install the binary image ,create the ramdisk and put the grub entries. since its an older kernel you might need to refer to back ports in /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://www.backports.org/debian etch-backports main

then download the latest any-any-patch
http://groups.google.com/group/vmkernelnewbies/web/vmware-any-any-update-116.tgz
and i had downloaded VMware-workstation-6.0.0-45731 already. Instead of running the vmware-install.pl inside VMware-workstation , run the runme.pl inside any-any-patch. The any-any-patch will detect VMware-workstation-6.0.0 and patch it and run.

when the installer tries to compile the vmmon modules , you might get a gcc incompatibility warning. Basically it says that the kernel was compiled using one version of gcc and now you are compiling vmmon module which should work closely with the kernel with another version of gcc.
This can happen if you apt-get the kernel , or if you upgrade gcc.
Thus , you might install gcc version the kernel was compiled with and change the symlink /usr/bin/gcc -> /usr/bin/gcc-4.1 to the required gcc version.

after which you should have VMware up and running :)