After installing Windows 7 in a VMware virtual machine, it could not activate the networking card. The Device Manager claimed that it could not recognize the NIC, despite VMware Tools being installed.
To fix the problem, I shut down the virtual machine and added the following to the .vmx file:
ethernet0.virtualDev = "e1000"
When the virtual machine was restarted, Windows 7 detected and activated the network card without a problem.