After a couple of Windows Update-induced host reboots, VMWare Bridged Networking suddenly stopped working–this was evidenced by being unable to ipconfig /renew my way to network happiness in the guest, while having no issues on any physical machines. I tried going back a couple of snapshots, until I was convinced it wasn’t the guest OS. Went to Edit | Virtual Network Settings, and on the Automatic Bridging tab, I decided to have a look at what adapters VMWare was trying to automatically bridge. I have two adapters built into the motherboard, and I wondered if it happened to be going after the one that wasn’t plugged in. I found two adapters after clicking “Add?” in the Excluded adapters section:

Intel PRO/1000 MT Dual Port Server Adapter – Packet Scheduler Miniport

Windows Mobile-based Device – Packet Scheduler Miniport

First one looked fine. Second one looked very odd indeed: present I believe because of my plugged-in pocket pc phone. When plugging it in for ActiveSync, it adds itself as an available network. I added that last row to the “Excluded” list, and ipconfig /renew was back up and running.

So a warning–if you’ve got a plugged in mobile device that supports networking, it may affect your VMWare installation.