VMWaring me out

So today has been somewhat of a long day. The girlfriend has been over going through all of my things in preparation of us moving in together. And by going through my things, I mean, me begging to keep things so they aren't thrown out.

But in the meantime, I have been really having some issues with getting this VM of Windows Server 2003 setup. I'm using VMWare to run the guest VM. My host OS is Windows 7 Ultimate x64. Everything seems to be running fine, but for the life of me, I cannot get this VM to maintain a connection to the internet.

The way the networking is currently setup at my place, is upstairs in the house I am in, is where the cable modem is located. Currently (although only for 1 more month) I live in the basement. I have two routers in this house. One router is a standard WRT54G router broadcasting the internet. The router in the basement is flashed with DD-WRT acting as a repeater bridge. My desktop is connecting to the repeater bridge for internet. There is no DHCP server running on the repeater bridge, so any machine connecting to that needs to have a statically assigned IP address.

My host machine is able to connect to the internet fine. However, the VM just keeps losing connectivity after 5 minutes or so. It's currently setup as having a bridged connection, and this is where it is losing its connectivity. However, this is odd, whenever I setup the VM to have NAT networking, the VM does not have any connectivity at all.

This isn't making sense to me. I could understand that incoming connections would have issues and not connect to the VM, but all outgoing connections from the VM should go through. I've also tried setting up another laptop to connect wirelessly, and then share its connection with an ethernet cord, and that does not work either. All the same issues.

For the time being, looks like I will only be able to update this very slowly. Hopefully the new networking (where I have direct access to the network) environment when I move to my new place will help solve this issue. Any ideas on the current situation though? Let me know.