Found a way to deal with this for VMware 9 on Linux (may work on older Linux versions).
There is a "shortcuts" file in your ".vmware" directory, it appears this file is created/updated whenever you exit VMware.
This file contains all of the current keyboard hot key settings for VMware, but they are all commented out with a semi-colon. If you edit this file to change the values to the empty string for the power off, suspend, and reset hot keys (and anything else that irritates you), remove the semi-colon at the start of each of these lines, and save the file, when you restart VMware, these settings will override the defaults.
Example line:
; (gtk_accel_path "<Actions>/App/vm-power-off" "<Control>e")
changed to this:
(gtk_accel_path "<Actions>/App/vm-power-off" "")
Attached is a copy of my current shortcuts file which disables power-off, reset, and suspend hotkeys, though it may have other differences from your shortcuts file as well.
Things to note:
All of the irritating power keys have at least two menu entries, so you will need to edit all related entries.
Changes to this file appear to be preserved when it is updated by VMware, but you might want to keep a backup copy of the changes just in case.
NOTE TO VMware: Adding the power-off and reset hot key settings as the default configuration is quite possibly the stupidest idea ever implemented in VMware (and I have been a user since BEFORE the 1.0 release).
