Shrink a VMWare Fusion Image

I run VMWare Fusion on my Mac. The Windows XP image is 13 GB and the VM disk is set to 30 GB max on 2 GB boundaries. I began to run out of disk space on my Mac and noticed that the VMWare image was taking about 44 GB. This made NO sense as only 13 GB was being used by WinXP. I was able to clean up all the extra space by deleting snapshots. If you think you’ve deleted all your snapshots and Fusion is still consuming a lot of space, take a snapshot of your VM and then immediately delete the snapshot. In deleting the snapshot, Fusion will clean up files left over from previous snapshots. Also, make sure you have plenty of free space. If Fusion states that it doesn’t have enough free space, make some free space by temporarily moving non-Fusion folders (e.g. Documents) to an external drive. Then take a snapshot and immediately remove the snapshot.