Perhaps the installation of the VM software 'automatically' provided a rule to the firewall that was buggering the FW because it tried to provide rules in Vista style as opposed to W7 style, and thus the SR restore the FW rules to default, which allows Home Networking to work....
Just a theory....
also from my point since i have vmware workstation the driver (i mean the lot) goes into the work location which is a big nono for homegroup.... (they enforced it like this since if you are going to use it in the workplace you might as well have a server machine (most likely having MS Server or Linux server))
W7 ultimate becomes with 128 cripto, if you need use with others OS change it in advanced configurations of network. It works for me to share a printer in W7 for Samba
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