First of all, I am very much aware of the needless pain and suffering I have caused myself by installing vCenter before assigning the correct hostname to the server. However, I've been able to weed out all the resulting problems except one; the hardware health tab still doesn't work.
I know that this is caused by a leftover from the old hostname since the vws.log dumps the following error when I try to access the tab:
[2009-08-18 10:07:09,550 Thread-52 ERROR 'com.vmware.vim.health.impl.ComponentSpec'] Error while trying to login to https://WIN-6S7KEDU17NJ:8443/vws/Login
However, what boggles me is that there doesn't seem to be a single reference to the old hostname in any of the xml files nor in the vCenter database itself. So where is this hostname being referenced I wonder?
Lastly, a tip to anyone installing vCenter on a windows 2008 server: The windows setup wizard never asks you for a hostname during the installation, it just auto-assigns a name to the host. Do remember to change the hostname before launching the vCenter installer and you'll save yourself a LOT of hassle 
