Had it set to bridged mode alread. It threw me off as to what the relationships were.
I had the class A internal network setup with my active physical card which was being picked up by the automatic bridging. I was thinking that vmnet1 (it's own virtual adaptor) was connected to this. When I opened the registry and read FreeBSD.vmx on ultraedit, everything started to make more sense. Now I can make my actual internet connection be the WAN to vmware, and drive the host computer via some route entries to get internet through the vmware LAN.
All is fine now. Thanks for the response.