Network Bridging XP

[Chris Liu]

I have an existing network bridge in Win XP bridging my two NICs
together. One NIC to the ADSL Modem and one to my local network Now, I
installed VMWARE and would like to add the guest to my existing local
network setup. Now there's 3 ways to go about this:

1) Add virtual ethernet adapter under the XP bridge
2) Create XP loopback adapter and do the vmnet0 bridge route
3) Bridge VMware guest to the XP bridge itself

#1 doesn't work right away because an error in XP popus up. VMware
itself doesn't allows its virtual adapters to be included in the
bridge.

#2 I got excited when the Vmware guest partially sees the network
because it sees Winroute's DHCP and its TCP/IP settings gets assigned
automatically. But I cannot ping or see any nodes on the network.

#3 Bridging to XP's bridge is the same as #2

So naturally I tried adding the loopback adapter under XP's bridge but
some errors popup and I think the VMware bridge protocol gets lost
during the XP bridging. Only the XP network bridge itself has the
VMware bridge protocol and can be bridged to. I don't think the
physical NICs can be bridge to once they are part of a bridge
themselves.

If anybody has done what I'm doing before and has had any luck, please
guide me through this. Or I'll just have to get a real router... :(