Not sure if anyone has run into this problem before or not. I'm unable to use a bridged connection on my virtual machines. I think this has something to do with me messing around with that OpenVPN software. I was playing with that and had at one point bridged my local connection with the vpn virtual connection. I received errors but have since disconnected and I thought everything was running fine.

Since then, I have found that when I attempt to bridge a virtual machine, all I can do is ping outside addresses. When I try to connect via browser, it times out.

I have changed over to NAT using VMnet8 and that seems to work fine. So long as that works, I guess I'm fine, but I figured I'd ask in case anyone else has run into that problem.

Thanks

Depending on what you are using this image for will determine if you are okay with NAT.  If you intend on using this image for any vulnerability and penetration testing then you might want to look into fixing bridged mode.  VMWare's NAT tables will fill up rapidly during Nessus or other vulnerability testing case.  This will lead to incomplete scans and information that would have been more productive on a bridged interface.

I've found the solution. I made a post on the vmware forums as well and with some extra advice the problem was narrowed down.

I have an Nvidia NIC on my board and the software that came with it (Nvidia Forceware) was causing the issue. After un-installing it, everything is working fine. I'm not quite sure why it all of a sudden stopped working, but I wasn't using that software anyway =P

Thanks again for the help.