Thanks for that explanation. Indeed, I've always thought that shutdown would be more thorough than restart.  I definitely do full shutdowns including power off and switch off at the PC's plug. Not hibernate.

The fact remains that after half a year of having this issue, I can say with some confidence that shutdown (with power off) and startup causes the VM startup fine, but the host can't connect to it i.e I can log in via the VMware image console, but can't run a putty session with ssh to the VM. Or if I have a web server running on the VM, can't connect to it with the host browser. 

Whereas, after a restart (and no power off) I can get a putty connection. I can then, reliably, get multiple ssh or http connections. 

I can only guess that there is some corruption creeping in, either in VMWare services or PC's network services, that gets cleared by a reset but not by a shutdown.  At least that was my guess after reading the Google post, not so much now. 

If not corruption, then maybe the order of services starting is the issue, perhaps some services start up more easily/quickly after a reset and prevent some kind of conflict. 

Or maybe it's a hardware issue with some residual power to a component being retained throughout reset and not after power off.

Not sure what I can do to diagnose further or resolve any of those things. Any ideas are most welcome. 

On the plus side, now I've found that reset gives me good connections, it's much less of a problem. 

Thanks very much for taking an interest RaSystemlord.