Thanks for the sanity check. I have changed The OS back to what it was previous > "other 3.x or later. "
On another note, YAY! After frantic troubleshooting, I discovered that in the network section of ESXi there were vswitch0 and vswitch1. vswitch0 had an uplink to the host only but vswitch1 which had all the VM's did not per my screenshot. I added another physical nic at the host and a cable to the physical switch, assigned the vnic1 that became enabled in VMWare to the vswitch1 and now my VCenter and other VM's are working in my browser. I don't know why I had to modify the connectivity as it did work without two nics before but its now working (This has happened in just the last 10 minutes). I was considering this as an RGE ( resume generating event) but I think I may be ok now!
