update 2024 - some years later I was able to switch back to Linux at work. I'll have to look up when I did and see if I have anything documented about it.

I won't get into why, after 10+ years I've switched my work desktop from Linux to Windows 7, but suffice to say its been painful. I still need access to a local linux install for various reasons so where I used to run Windows in a VM under linux, I now need to run linux in a VM under Windows. I ran into a problem which Googling didn't immediately solve and since there were other folks with a similar problem out there I thought I'd write it up.

• I have a Windows 7 64bit host, with Virtualbox 5.1.28 r117968 (Qt5.6.2) installed.
• I have a Broadcom NetXtreme 57xx network card on the host.
• I couldn't get the guest (an Ubuntu 16.04 VM) set up with a bridged network adapter.
• It would work with NAT, but I needed the guest to be on the same network as the host. I'm used to doing this the other way around (Linux host / Windows guest) and haven't had any problems.
• In the Virtualbox Settings for the VM, under Network, for Adapter 1 in Attached to: I selected "Bridged Adapter"
• The dropdown below that (Name:) was empty (it didn't see my host's Broadcom adapter)
• This is because there was no service "VirtualBox NDIS6 Bridged Networking Driver" listed on the "VirtualBox Host-Only Ethernet Adapter"
• I chose Install, Service, Add - and Windows knew that that service needed a driver, but the path under which it was searching for it was borked.
• I took note that it was trying to find vboxnetlwf.inf but the path was pointing to a Windows Temp folder which no longer existed after the install of Virtualbox.
• I navigated to that folder under: `C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\` instead, and it installed fine and bridging worked!

Note: Win7 still reports that there is a problem with the network connection but it does work.