VM Player - Disk space - Shrinked

The disk files created for the Virtual machine in my PC constantly grew in size until the whole of the host drive was used up.

I could not possibly find what would have gone wrong, because inside the virtual machine, the disk space utilized was not compensating to the usage of the host disk space usage.

Things I have done to get the disk space usage within limit.

1. Open VM Player, select the virtual machine, Click Edit Virtual Machine Properties.
• Select the disk drive and from the utilities dropdown list select "Defragment Disk"
2. After starting the virtual machine, open the VM tools and go to "Shrink", select the disks to shrink and shrink.
• Problem I faced while shrinking was, there should be enough space available in the host drive for the shrink to happen.

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.