I know there have been several threads, but I've dug through everyone one I've found with no success. This seems to be different.
A Win7 VM I've had for a long time has started reporting IP address conflicts, but they're guaranteed false.I don't know when the failure mode started, as I haven't used this VM for a while, but it could have been upon moving to a Dell from the Thinkpad I used for a couple of years.
The VM has three NICs configured. One uses Bridged/wired (VMnet0), one uses Bridged/wifi (VMnet2) and one uses host only. The one bridged to wifi always gives "Windows has detected an IP address conflict." It does this on every wifi network, even ones that are otherwise empty - which is how I know it's bogus. The MAC addresses don't conflict with anything on the notebook, and there's nothing else they could conflict with. It doesn't matter which of the three virtual NICs is mapped to the wifi adapter, it's always the wifi connection that fails.
I have never seen a problem with any of my XP VMs.
The system log message is "The system detected an address conflict for IP address 0.0.0.0 with the system having network hardware address 24-77-03-85-1B-A4. Network operations on this system may be disrupted as a result." 24-77-03-85-1B-A4 is the MAC address of the host wifi adapter, but I sincerely doubt the router would have handed out a 0.0.0.0 address by DHCP 
. And again, even if the router was doing weird stuff, this is three separate wifi networks, with different hardware and DHCP providers.
I can only imagine that either a) I have something screwed up in my VMX file or b) VMware doesn't play well with my NIC. I upgraded from 7.x to 9.0.0 today mostly in an attempt to solve this, but no change.
Wifi NIC is listed in network editor as Intel(R) Centrino(R) Ultimate-N 6300 AGN
Wired NIC is Intel(R) 82579LM Gigabit Network Connection
Or maybe I won't attach the VMX because it's encrypted, but I can decrypt the VM if that would help resolve this.
Any suggestions?