There have been a number of people reporting that when they start a virtual machine - they get the following error:

The network adapter with address "00:00:00:00:00:00" of virtual machine "...." failed to initialize because the address is a null address.

To fix this problem you should use REGEDIT to:

  1. Examine the key value at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E972-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002bE10318}\<nnnn>\DriverDesc to locate the desired host adapter where <nnnn> is a four digit number.
  2. Look at the GUID value for the NetCfgInstanceId key value.
  3. Add the DWORD key at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\VPCNetS2\Parameters\Adapters\<guid>\Flags and set the value to 0 where <guid> is the GUID found in step 2.
  4. Restart the computer.

If you want to see the details of this error see

http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2005/01/17/354971.aspx