I noticed today that WinPE 2, like all the WinPEs before it, does not have a built in network card driver for VMWare. Now you could add a driver to WinPE 2 by using the peimg /inf command but I just wanted to test something really quickly and didn't want the hastle of making a new WinPE 2 disk.

So I discovered you can tell VMWare to use emulate an Intel e1000 network card which works great with WinPE 2. Just add ethernet0.VirtualDev = "e1000" to your .vmx file!!