Windows 7 + VMWare Workstation 7 - no internet access

I'm running Windows 7 and VMWare Workstation 7, and I cannot access the internet from any virtual machines using bridged connections. I used to be able to, so I'm not quite sure what happened. I did not modify anything within VMWare....

bridged connections are set as they were by default - to use vmnet0. They are capable of pulling an IP and DHCP info from the router, but beyond that they cannot access the internet or do anything else.

On the win7 host machine, under network adapters, I do not see vmnet0 listed - I'm not sure if it is supposed to be or not. It only shows vmnet1 (host-only) and vmnet8 (NAT).

I would rather use bridged connections if possible, but just cannot seem to get it to work.

Yesterday, I couldn't even get NAT to work. It could ping servers, but I couldn't actually use the internet - I guess ICMP was working but not TCP for some reason, although I hadn't modified anything. I updated from VMWare 6.5 to 7.0 and now NAT works, but bridged connections still fail.

Does anyone have any ideas what the problem might be? I've searched the web for solutions but haven't found any that worked (disable vmware adapters, modify registry so that they don't show up under public unidentified networks, etc).

Could it be related to the fact that vmnet0 doesn't show up anywhere on the host machine? I'm not sure if it is supposed to or not - vmnet1 and vmnet8 both show up under network adapters and using ipconfig/all. However, vmnet0 does not show up between either.

In VMWare Virtual Network Editor, vmnet1 and vmnet8 are listed as host connected, whereas vmnet0 just has a dash. However, the 'connect to host' button does not function for bridged connections like it does for the rest of the connections, so perhaps it's not supposed to show up on the host machine - I don't know.

I am having this exact same problem on my system right now. Did you ever find a fix for it or does anyone else have one?