When installing VMware server 2 on a vista ultimate 32/64bit machine you get the following error when trying to logon:

The VMware Infrastructure Web Service at “http://localhost:8222/sdk” is not responding (Connection Refused)

Turns out that in my Vista Ultimate 64 installation the host file entry for localhost has been reduced to  the IPV6 lookup only:

::1             localhost

Adding back the usual:

127.0.0.1     localhost

Fixed the problem!