[Blind-sysadmins] vmware workstation, linux guests, and USB thumb drives

Hello, I'm running VMware workstation 11 on a win10 machine 64 bit. I've attempted to get a usb thumb drive to be recognized under three Linux guest distributions no success. They were Ubuntu 17.04/17.10, arch Linux latest, and Debian8. The drive is a USB2, I know that USB3 support is spotty from what I read, and I can see it in the vm removable devices. I disconnect the drive and connect it to the vm. In no case does the drive get detected, no /media/mountpoint and no /proc/bus/usb for the usbfs filesystem. What am I missing? Thanks. Dave.