Oh - I did misunderstand.
Every network config is different. On my home lan, I've got a gateway appliance sitting in front of my cablemodem running NAT and DHCP. This means if my VMWare instance can connect to the gateway, I'm on the LAN just like any other machine I have at home and can connect to anywhere inside the lan and on the internet as well.
Bridged *should* mean that you can talk to both the host and the outside world if you've got a separate gateway running NAT as I do. The way Don describes it, it sounds like his bridged connection is operating the way Host-Only is supposed to (connecting only to the host and nowhere else). The VMWare doc's don't suggest that both are necessary, but it wouldn't surprise me that sometimes it is.
One important thing: I've noticed in some 2.0 releases of VMWare that the bridged networking adapter service would not automatically start in W2K or would occasionally die. That's been the most likely cause of my connectivity woes. Use Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Services to lookup and restart the VMWare bridged network adapter service. Then try pinging the host from within the VM.
If you're on 3.0 then it's probably something else (try Don's suggestion and/or hit the support groups)
