I use VMware Workstation to run my development virtual machines. I prefer it over Microsoft’s offerings for two main reasons, USB support and high resolution/multi-monitor support inside of virtual machines.

There is however, a very annoying problem when you install VMware on Vista (and Windows Server 2008). When you install VMware it adds a few virtual network adapters. For various reasons, these adapters are listed in the Network Sharing Center as being on an “Unidentified network (Public network)” and all of the features under Sharing and Discovery are turned off .

Here is the best fix I’ve found thanks to a post by richv in the VMware forum:

1. Run regedit
2. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E972-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}
3. Underneath you should see several keys labeled 0000, 0001, 0002 etc… Look through these and find the VMware adapters. They will probably be near the end of the list if you just installed VMware.
4. For each of the VWware adapters, add a new DWORD value named “*NdisDeviceType” and set it to 1 (make sure you get the * at the beginning of the name, I missed that the first time).
5. Disable and Enable each of the network adapters.

That should take care of the problem. Setting *NdisDeviceType to 1 causes Windows to ignore the device when it does network identification. Here is an MSDN article with more details.

Scott Hanselman has a great post on junctions in Windows Vista. Scott mentioned that he was seeing different behavior from David Mohundro surrounding the Documents and Settings folder. I ran my own tests and this is what I came up with.

C:\>dir /ad
 Volume in drive C has no label.
 Volume Serial Number is 6053-B050

 Directory of C:\

09/16/2006 01:38 AM   <DIR>      $Recycle.Bin
09/05/2006 06:12 PM   <DIR>      Boot
09/22/2006 12:59 AM   <DIR>      dnn
08/29/2006 05:35 PM   <JUNCTION> Documents and Settings [C:\Users]
09/05/2006 06:13 PM   <DIR>      MSOCache
09/26/2006 06:25 AM   <DIR>      Program Files
09/20/2006 02:46 PM   <DIR>      ProgramData
09/29/2006 03:41 AM   <DIR>      System Volume Information
09/05/2006 06:00 PM   <DIR>      Users
09/17/2006 09:06 AM   <DIR>      utils
09/23/2006 04:50 PM   <DIR>      Windows
              0 File(s)            0 bytes
             11 Dir(s) 8,475,971,584 bytes free

So I’m seeing “C:\Documents and Settings” as a junction pointing to the new C:\Users. Makes Sense, but a directory listing on Documents and Settings didn’t return anything.

C:\Documents and Settings>dir /a
 Volume in drive C has no label.
 Volume Serial Number is 6053-B050

 Directory of C:\Documents and Settings

File Not Found

However, I was able to change to “C:\Documents and Settings\rob”, and it behaved as expected, showing the same contents as C:\Users\rob. Looking further, when I double click Documents and Settings in explorer I get an “Access denied” message. Looking at the folder permissions gave the answer, Documents and Settings has a special permission setting of Deny Everyone for “List folder / read data”.