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I'm currently trying to change my development from VMWare to VirtualBox and am having some trouble getting the host and VM to talk. With VMWare I am using a bridged connection. I tried Adapter Types PCnet-Fast III and Intel PRO/1000 MT desktop with Bridged Adapter and Broadcom NetXtreme 57xx Gigabit Controller. My host is connected to the work LAN via a netgear switch. If I ping the host I get a Destination Host Unreachable error and if I ping the VM I get a request timed out error. I've also tried NAT and I can ping with a > 90% error rate. I would appreciate any help that you could provide. VM using Ubuntu and host is windows XP.

First of all, remove the VMWare tools. They can cause major problems, especially on Windows Guests (even though you're not using that now). On Windows, these tools replaces the original drivers with VMW's own driver and those don't work on VB.

Back to the problem itself. Does the Guest get an IP address? Is it the same as the Host or not?
If you only want a Host-Guest only connection, you can use Host-Only for it.

Yes the guest gets an IP which is different from the host but within the same subnet. I'm using the VM to act as a NFS mount for an embedded device I'm working on. I haven't gotten to the point of connecting those up yet so I'm not sure if that would be an issue or not.

I tried Host-only and the two were able to ping each other but I was unable to get pscp to work. It came back with a "Network error: Connection refused" error. Also, performing updates on the guest failed with multiple "Could not resolve '...'" messages.

With Host-Only, you don't have internet access on the Guest. Add a second NIC attached to NAT if you need internet. When using Bridged, it should be no problem, but I've read that some users didn't have perfect Host-Guest connectivity through that, while other systems on the network did have a working connection back and forth.

When you get Connection Refused, it means that there's either a firewall blocking the request, or the OS isn't listening on the port you're trying to connect to. You would get the same error if you would try to use SSH to the Guest when it doesn't run an SSH server, or it's configured to listen on a different port.