Hmm, that may be a possibility.
I think part of the problem was I developed this on a windows 8 machine, so I can't eliminate the idea that maybe it's a cross compatibility issue as well. Under the hood the engine is entirely using python and SDL2 bindings. I use the SDL2 software renderer for it, so it's probably trying to fetch the best renderer it can find on the virtual device... and maybe it has issues with that.
Are you running the VMware from a win 11 machine, or is the virtual machine running a win 11 instance?