I'm stuck with what seems a bug in VmWare Player (build 203739). I'm using W7 Ultimate 64bits as host and have a CentOS 5.4 (64 bits) as a guest and a Windows XP Professional SP3 (32 bits) as another guest. From the 64 bits machines (the host and the linux guest) I cannot ping the windows XP.

Off course, I already turned off the windows firewall in the guest and also in the host. The network is pretty basic, I'm using Vmnet8 (NAT), with DHCP and port forwarding (to the windows XP's IP). Everything is working ok, I have internet access from host and from both guests. Port forwarding to the XP guest is working ok too. The only problem is that I cannot access the XP guest through the Vmnet8.

I monitored the traffic using wireshark (in the host and in the windows guest). If I try to ping the XP guest from the host, what I see is the ARP request leaving the host, being answered by the guest and, after that, there is no echo request leaving the host. The same occurs if I try to ping the XP from the CentOs guest.

From the windows XP guest I can ping both the host and the CentOs guest. From the XP guest I can access the host shares. Obviously, from the host I cannot see the XP shares (as I cannot even ping the guest).

I want to maintain this setup (using NAT to share the host's internet connection). Any suggestions?