This seems to dovetail with a l-o-n-g discussion in the Server 1 forum about intermittent connectivity to/from VMs (VMware Communities: Bridged networking just quit!) People have linked the problem to WS 2003, anti-virus packages and Broadcom NICs. It's very murky. I have real XP with a virtual Linux and the Linux loses TCP visibility, entirely for my Weblogic server app., intermittently for telnet. As for your ping by IP working but failing by name, that makes sense as with no TCP (or UDP?) out, your DNS lookup will fail.