Though I guess you want to communicate with that VM on your internal network. Yea... bridged would be better. You could install Workstation and use the virtual network editor to configure things, but then just use Player anyway. I don't think you'd be prevented from doing that by the license checks.

Ah, so it was present in previous Player releases. Hmm, yea this unfortunately leaves you in a tight spot. I think there are issues with uninstalling a product with the networking components; the uninstall will remove your networking setup, so you probably can't install a different version to configure your environment and then switch to the newest release to run VMs in that setup.

You could try installing a dummy WS that you'll never use (apart from the network UI), or coinstalling an older Player... ugh, I'll see what's up with this product change.

I don't like the fact that users have to even use a separate application to configure a VMs networking setup as desired (what you're trying to do is ridiculously reasonable). But that is an aged old war that I have been losing for years

This is very frustrating. In VMware Player 2.5.3 I was using vmnetcfg.exe for port forwarding. Now with VMware Player 3.0.0 build-197124 vmnetcfg.exe is missing and I cannot do that. Please do not remove vmnetcfg.exe from player.

Thanks