I develop on a Mac with MAMP Pro, and I am running Windows 7 in VirtualBox VM so I can test my WordPress sites in Internet Explorer. The problem is that when I try to load the page in a browser in the VM (http://10.0.2.2:8888) it takes about 30 seconds to load the page.
Most of that time is "Connecting to..." in Firefox and "Waiting for..." in IE, so it seems to be having a long delay finding the host system. If I reload the page and/or browser to another page, it takes just as long for every page.
If I use Safari/Chrome/Firefox on the host system to access localhost:8888 it runs fine. If I access outside sites on the VirtualBox system (including an exact copy of the same website on an outside server) it runs fine. The lengthy delay only occurs when I try to access the host's WordPress site from the VM.
Host: Mac OSX Snow Leopard, MAMP Pro (Apache) on port 8888 running WordPress.
VM: Windows 7 accessing with Firefox 9 and Internet Explorer 9.
Any ideas?