Otherwise, the VMWare Server virtual machines are completely isolated from their hosts and thus essentially worthless if any kind of data sharing is desired (like here), except via USB drives and/or CD/DVDs.
Not at all, and even if this were the case, it would be listed as a win in my book for just this type of separation.
There are 3 separate types of networking for vmware. You chose the one which isolates the vmware client the most. I'll assume you read the descriptions involved with each option and not bore you with the details here. However the long and short of it is that vmware workstation and ESX have options to set up a share directly with the host. I don't believe vmware server does, however if you have samba properly configured and your firewall is set to allow the SMB/CIFS ports, then you should have no trouble at all emulating this behavior.
As you have it set up with bridging, your host thinks your vmware client is just another system on your network, and will be treated as such for the most part. I suspect your problem lies within your firewall (your error message "Network path not found" is a good clue), and you could test this by disabling iptables temporarily.
Is there another solution for data sharing between Linux and Windows on the same machine (with Linux being the native host OS)?
Sure. apache, webdav, sftp, scp, pick your poison. They all work quite well.
Doesn't WINE do something like this?
No. Where did you get this idea? Wine is a translation layer (a program loader) capable of running Windows applications on Linux. It does not do file sharing between the two unless that's the task of the windows app you're trying to run.
Expecting the impossible, as usual, I suppose....
<Gripe> Well, if you're not going to read the documentation, look at the options within the application you're using, or apply common sense (aka google) then yes, your task may be quite insurmountable. However, if you troubleshoot a bit, look at the actual error messages you're getting you should have it up and running in no time. For that matter, you could probably use the system-config-samba tool or whatever ships with centos to configure samba and get it working. In short: quit your crying, read the documentation and get back to work. </Gripe>