I had similar problems despite injecting the vmware drivers offline and then recompiling. It appears that the default WinPE image does not enable the protocols and so on, and this needs to be either added to a batch file, such as StartNet.cmd, or manually invoked from a command line. I ammended StartNet.cmd so that it has the following at the start wpeinit ; should be in there by default netcfg -v -winpe ; added this manually After doing that, things worked fine, and picked up an IP from my DHCP server immediately.