Troubleshooting the Windows 8.1 upgrade: VMWare Workstation network connectivity lost

Another issue with my Windows 8.1 upgrade involved VMWare Workstation. I was still on version 8.0.6 which had worked fine for almost a year on Windows 8. After the upgrade, the Windows 7 guest that I have been using no longer connected to the network.

Apparently a common problem, and a bit of googling revealed that others resolved this by reinstalling VMWare Workstation. I had to do an upgrade, though, because I no longer had the installation file for the same version of Workstation 8.0.6. This was a mistake, because whatever I tried from there did not resolve the issue.

In the end, I upgraded to Workstation 10, still to no avail. The guest would not connect. I reinstalled VMWare and the VMWare Utilities many times, rebooted, reset the network settings to the defaults in the Virtual Network Editor, made sure the VMWare Bridge Protocol was active in the host’s network adapter settings, nothing helped.

I finally called support. They happily opened a case, but were not able to help me right away. Because the issue was urgent, I made one last attempt. I did an explicit uninstallation of VMWare Workstation. When asked if I wanted to save the license key and configuration data, I unchecked the configuration data and only saved the license key.

When I reinstalled, the setup asked me a few questions that it had not asked me before when I just did a regular upgrade or repair installation. And finally, once the installation completed, the system rebooted and my VMWare guest was able to establish a network connection again.