I have VMware Player and F7-Revisor applicance (Fedora 7). This works well on Vista and is incredibly fast. However, there is a problem. Fedora has access to the internet, but it isn't talking to the network's DHCP server, the IP address given to eth0 (192.168.225.128 subnet 255.255.255.0) is not within the range allowed by the network's DHCP server, so clearly Fedora is getting the IP address from somewhere else. The dhcpd daemon is not running.

ifcfg-eth0 is:

DEVICE=eth0
ONBOOT=yes
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
HWADDR=xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
DCHP_HOSTNAME=xxxxxx
TYPE=Ethernet
USERCTL=no
IPV6INIT=no
PEERDNS=no

VMWare player has ethernet enabled and set to NAT.

The effect is that although this Fedora appliance can access the internet, it cannot access any other machine on the network.

What can I do to get the appliance to talk to the local network?

well if you are using NAT networking, then DHCP on your physical network is irrelevant. you actually want bridged networking if you want the VM to behave exactly as if it were and other machine on your physical network.