had same issue for weeks, was so frustrated, vmware tech support could care less. Went to version 5.0 drivers like was suggested and worked, but just totally absurd that Vmware comes out with latest release, breaks the basic e1000 driver on certain machines and doesn't even care to fix it. I bet if we cancelled our larger enterprise agreements they might think twice but doubt it.
Vmware is great, their support is questionable, have to resort to other experts to get help even when have enterprise support