50% cpu usage after stopping VMs and missing VMNet0 problems

Lately I've been having intermittent problems with VMware Workstation.  I'm on version 7.1.6 and I know that's severely dated but that's all I'm able to work with since I use VMware Workstation for work, they aren't upgrading.  These problems finally became irritating enough to join the community to hopefully get an idea of what's going on.  I'll take the problems one at a time:

The network bridge on device VMnet0 is not running.

Most of the information I've found online is several years old and none of it has been all too helpful.  I think this may be related to Windows services related VMware starting up before the services related to network connectivity have had a chance to fully come up.  Hopefully the workarounds that have given me some success can serve as a point of reference for people searching for solutions; however temporary:

1. Go to view network connections in the control panel
2. Right-click on the ethernet connection that is used for the bridged connection.
3. Properties
4. Uncheck VMWare Bridge Protocol
5. Ok
6. Right-click on that same ethernet connection, select disable
7. Right-click on that same ethernet connection.
8. Properties
9. Check VMWare Bridge Protocol
10. Ok
11. Right-click on that same ethernet connection, select enable
12. Wait for the connection to reestablish.
13. Start your VM.

That provess works for me about 75% of the time.  Other times I have to reboot the host a few times and repeat the process above before it finally works.  No ammount of diddling with vmnetcfg.exe resolves the problem.  In one more extreme case I found that c:\Windows\System32\vmnetbridge.dll had gone completely missing.  That required a full reinstall of VMware Workstation.

System, PID 4, NT Kernel & System occasionally goes to 50% usage after stopping VMs

This is the most irritating problem I've faced as the only solution to get the process out of 50% CPU usage is to reboot the host.  I've used process explorer and the farthest I've been able to trace down is to a lock in hal.dll.  I'd say that I have about a 1 in 5 chance of this problem occuring any time I stop a virtual machine.  I'd really love to know more about this and how to prevent it as I frequently run multiple VMs and having to reboot the host is a pain.

Other info: Windows 7 64bit.