Harry,

Ya know? I installed VMware player. The installation asked me a ton of questions with defaults provided. I accepted them.
It killed my network. When I ran the My_Super_Easy_VM.vdx, I also got errors for:
parallel0 not found, and the same with the serial port.

I had to remove all of it's startup stuff in /etc/ and /etc/dhcpc/resolve.conf was changed to a non existant ip.
Not the kind of thing windows users can do. Unless they are familiar with VMware.

I saved the installation output in case you want to know I did wrong, cause I sure don't.

My final verdict is the same as the one I started this topic with.
VirtualBox is so much easier, and works great.

cheers