I created a Windows 7 VM in Windows 10 Pro perhaps 5 years ago.
It worked fine for many years.
I rarely use this VM (maybe once every two or three months, sometimes longer) and very few changes have been made to this VM, but now suddenly the virtual NIC inside the VM is not working.
In other words, I get no IP address, and no connection to the real LAN or the Internet. Specifically, the NIC in Windows 7 now reports that it is on an "Unidentified Network" and seems to not be getting assigned an IP by DHCP.
I have no clue why this would happen, as no changes have been made to the VM settings, and the real NIC on the Windows 10 Pro hypervisor machine is working fine. Additionally, nothing has changed on the DHCP end (except for automatic updates to the Windows Server 2012 R2 machine running as the DHCP server) and DHCP is working perfectly for every other machine except this VM.
I'm assuming that one of the numerous automatic Windows updates that have been applied between five years ago and now "broke" something related to the VM configuration, but I have no idea where to even start looking for the problem.
I would guesstimate that the last time I used this VM without any problems was back in June-ish of 2022.
Can someone point me in a likely direction?