Some web sites drop connections from the guest, without returning anything (even headers).  This happens with twitter.com when run from

    * VMWare Fusion 2.0.2 on an OS X 10.5.5 host, with bridged networking, from a Windows XP SP3 guest
    * VMWare Player 2.0.5 on a Windows XP SP3 host, with NAT networking, from a Windows XP SP3 guest

This behavior is independent of the tool I use to send the request to the server:

    * I tried fetching http://twitter.com/ from Firefox, and the connection gets dropped before returning data to Firefox.
    * I tried using "wget –user-agent=Mozilla –server-response http://twitter.com/" and it reports "Read error (Connection reset by peer) in headers"
    * I tried using telnet to port 80 at twitter.com, and issuing "GET /" manually, and the host disconnects immediately after I press Enter after the "GET /"


Event Viewer on the Windows guests shows no errors.  Neither guest is running a firewall.  On both hosts, I can fetch the page via all the tools, but in the guest, twitter.com disconnects after receiving the request.

I’m not running a firewall on the OS X host.  There is firewall software on the Windows host, but I told it not to filter connections.  (I can’t remove it entirely.  Corporate IT policy.)

What else could I try?  It really looks like some web servers are configured to reject GET requests that match some criteria, and VM guests match that criteria.

I’ll donate $20 to a charity of your choice if you’re the first commenter to come up with a solution.