Gave up using the VMware image and established an environment with the VirtualBox image as described.
It seems to use more resources on my system than the VMware system, but maybe that's just how it is...
Now the Clip+ Simulator is built OK, but it seems to loop.
When i issue the svn co svn://svn.rockbox.org/rockbox/trunk rockbox command, I seem to get the sources for the last daily build (which is probably what most people want) - but how do I get the latest stable release instead? I'll try building the simulator from that.
Regards, Ole