Living in a (VMware) box

I've recently decided to take the plunge, and completely virtualize my day-to-day machine.
As with most things, it wasn't without problems...
I'd had a copy of VMware Workstation 5.5 evaluation floating about on my system, and used it on a daily basis. So I thought that I should start a big project, that to configure a virtual machine to house a Windows XP installation and my applications, inside a VM. As it was, XP installed without a hitch, and I'd set up my USB ADSL modem to work bridged to the VM. I could access the Internet and see files on the host, at the expense of having an active Internet connection (not a good thing, even with a hardware NAT). So I'd unshared all of the folders, and mounted them with Workstation's Shared Folders feature instead. So from then it was plain sailing, and the VM would dutifuly serve my needs - or so I thought. My VMware evaluation was due to expire in a few days, so I'd decided to use my copy of the brand new Server Beta.
The virtual machine ran perfectly, but I'd soon discovered that Server didn't support Shared Folders, so I had to play with the network settings in Server to get things working.
Eventually, I'd reached a compromise - I could access the Internet if I'd disabled the virtual networking adapter that was providing access to a selection of the host's files, but I couldn't use iTunes to listen to music in the VM.