VM Player - Freeze Intermittently - Problem

For the past couple of days the VM player that I am using was getting frozen for 15-20 seconds. This occurred at a frequency of 1 Hr everyday. I did not have any idea what had gone wrong, until I noticed the previous week the LAN configuration at my work had changed. It gave me a clue that the problem is due to the network, but why is my VM player in need of a network connection, when all I need to access resources locally.

I started troubleshooting the issue, around the clue that the VM player needs network access, but what for I was not clear. Some of the candidates that were considered for further investigation were
Local Folder Map
Internet Access

The local folder map was stroked off from the list as I found it did not have anything to do with the recent LAN change.

The next candidate was Internet Access, and it was the right candidate to put my effort to find the root cause of the problem. In the preferences of the VM Player, I had opted for software updates. I unchecked the checkboxes that made the VM player to check for updates and finally the VM player performance problem was fixed.