Every now and then my Windows XP virtual machine goes on the fritz and cannot access the network. I restart Fusion, restart Windows XP, try to reinstall Fusion, changing from NAT to bridged, and back again but nothing seems to work. I’ve run in to this problem twice in the last month, and it was driving me crazy. It would die for a few hours or days and just come back to working as if nothing had happened.
The intertubes were of no help until I stumbled upon a set of tools that ship with Fusion that basically restarts the networking stack (actually I think it’s supposed to restart the entire VM). If you can’t seem to get anything to work on your VM in VMware Fusion, give this shell script a go from the Terminal. If you have HardwareGrowler running, you’ll see it detatch and reattach all the VMware devices.
sudo /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/boot.sh --restart