I have been following directions for bridged networking from the VirtualBox manual and have taken steps to reset the changes that I made so that I can start over:
uninstalled bridge-utils
uninstalled uml-utilities
[After uninstalling these my host can access the network again which is great]
I am left with interface tap0 - how do I get rid of it so that I can start trying to get this working from scratch?
Also what is the difference between a VMWare bridged network and a VirtualBox one? I see people configuring 6 bridges manually for 6 virtual machines on the forums here which is a strange idea to me coming from VMWare where the 'bridge' could be used for any number of virtual machines.