VMware Unidentified Network Issue in Vista and Windows Server 2008 Fix
There is however, a very annoying problem when you install VMware on Vista (and Windows Server 2008). When you install VMware it adds a few virtual network adapters. For various reasons, these adapters are listed in the Network Sharing Center as being on an “Unidentified network (Public network)” and all of the features under Sharing and Discovery are turned off .
Here is the best fix I’ve found thanks to a post by richv in the VMware forum:
- Run regedit
- Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E972-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}
- Underneath you should see several keys labeled 0000, 0001, 0002 etc… Look through these and find the VMware adapters. They will probably be near the end of the list if you just installed VMware.
- For each of the VWware adapters, add a new DWORD value named “*NdisDeviceType” and set it to 1 (make sure you get the * at the beginning of the name, I missed that the first time).
- Disable and Enable each of the network adapters.
That should take care of the problem. Setting *NdisDeviceType to 1 causes Windows to ignore the device when it does network identification. Here is an MSDN article with more details.
