I have a CentOS 5.3 VM running under VMware on a WIndows XP laptop. Everything works fine when connected to the network. However, removed from the network, most everything in the CentOS VM takes minutes to complete. For instance, starting a new Terminal window takes over 3 minutes. I did an strace, and there are a couple of long waits when trying to open a socket (/tmp/.ICE-unix/XXXXX for instance). The host and the VM can ping each other fine, but any access to the VM (either external or from within) eventually succeeds, but it takes a long time. First, I thought I'd reduce the default socket timeout (which I believe is set to around 90 seconds), but I can't find where to do that on a system wide level. But I really need to figure out what is causing the problem in the first place. I'm assuming the network is somehow misconfigured, but I don't know how. Alfred