Remote Desktop to a machine running Vista and VMWare Workstation?

[KrakaJap]

Here's an issue I ran into that I cannot seem to figure out:

I recently upgraded to Vista (please don't ask me why) and I do a lot of remoting into both my work machine and home machine (work machine is XP). Using Remote Desktop, I have had no issues at all until I installed VMWare (latest). I can Remote Desktop into my work machine just fine from home but when I try to remote into my home machine it fails. This happened along side a recent power outage and my WAN IP being changed so I thought something might have just been screwed up either on the router or perhaps my local IP changed too. Neither of these were the case as I figured out my Remote Desktop worked again when I uninstalled VMWare. So just to be certain I re-installed VMWare and sure enough RD was dead... uninstalled and RD came back. Any ideas? I've been searching around for insight to this but have yet to find any.

EDIT: Well it's definately the network adapters that are installed with VMWare that conflict with RDP in Vista. I can have VMWare installed but if I wish to remote into my Vista machine I have to first make sure I've disabled the VMWare network adapters. This could get quite annoying in my position as I remote into my machine all the time from work as well as do a lot with VMs everyday. I guess, however, if there is no other solution then this is what I must do until a fix comes out.

[Scissor]

VMware installs two additional 'VMware Virtual Ethernet Adapters' on your Host machine to support NAT and Host-Only networking modes for VM Guests. Vista sees those two new Ethernet adapters and assumes that your machine is now connected to two additional Public networks. Since Public networks can be dangerous, Vista reconfigures its firewall appropriately to block incoming connections.

If you are satisfied with configuring your Guest VMs to use Bridged networking (the default setting for new VMs, I believe) then you can simply disable the two new Virtual Ethernet adapters and Vista's firewall will revert back and you will then be able to accept incoming RDP connections again. That's what I do. To make this change, start VMware Workstation -> Edit -> Virtual Network Settings-> Host Virtual Adapters -> Select each of the adapters and click "Disable".

I think I remember seeing a few threads about this issue a few months ago. If you search the forums you should be able to find those threads that cover this in more detail. Edit: Here are some threads discussing this issue:

http://communities.vmware.com/message/647956

http://communities.vmware.com/message/713815

http://communities.vmware.com/message/658493

Hope this helps!

[KrakaJap]

That is actually what I have done but I did not realize I didn't have to re-enable those adapters. Are you saying that as long as I am using a Bridged connection, I can disable those new adapters permanently and still have network functionality through my VM while retaining RDP?

[Scissor]

Yes, this is how I have my Vista Host set up.

[KrakaJap]

Awesome! Thank you very much for the quick response!