Dear all, this has been a bug in VMWare Server for a long time, but I never got around to submitting it (the VMWare web-site does not seem to allow you to submit a bug if you don't have a support contract). I'll just post it here so it might be read by someone at VMWare at some point.
Here's the problem: If you boot a VM through PXE over the network, everything works fine. If you subsequently issue a soft reboot (e.g. 'reboot' if the OS you booted is Linux) and let the machine go into PXE boot again, it will just sit there trying to get a DHCP response. Resetting the VM resolves the issue.
I suspect that the PXE code in the network boot ROM is not reinitialized when a soft reboot is performed.
Best regards,
Martijn de Vries