One technical side note… during these experiments I found that when I switched from direct connections to NAT and back, I could not always get out to the internet. This was because the routing table still held all three gateways. The answer to this is to delete and add the gateways as needed, which you can do with batch files.

Figure 4

More than that, the more I switched around in active combinations the more likely it was that something would go wrong and I could no longer ping someone from somewhere. Try not to switch things around too much when you have a good working combination. But if you just can’t get things fixed, my suggestion is to disable EVEYTHING. Then enable all required adapters on the host. For example if you plan to be on the LAN with a wire, enable just those; else the wireless or air card. Then enable the desired combination in the Virtual PC software settings, one of the four adapters as seen in Figure 4. Then finally enable the Virtual OS adapters as needed. This way all of the route table entries are built as they are needed and removed otherwise. The most notable example of this would be when using an air card and Virtual PC NAT.