vmplayer and samba and eth0 issue, please help. [SOLVED]

[Sparrowmelody]

Hello!
Today I ran into a small problem when interacting with vmware and my machine.
You see, I used to have a setup like this: My machine(gentoo) was connected with a crossover cable to my laptop(winxp) using the ethernet device eth0. I used it to access my machine from vmplayer (winxp) to share certain device's data between both (it's wondrous how vmware can deal with anything but USB drives, even tablets and bluetooth!).
Because of a new setup I don't need the laptop connected (normally) anymore so I removed the cable. And when starting eth0, it won't connect to vmware or the opposite. I needed to connect to the laptop again to be able to transfer something...is there anything i can do about this? I mean, a dedicated network device?
Unfortunaly I don't know what to do in this case, please help me! *puppy eyes*

EDIT: Well, I had to remake the config to use a hostonly network type. Then I set the IP address of the virtual machine to "auto" and change the IP for the samba shares to the one reported in ipconfig. Sorry for the inconvenience.
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WRYYY!