This is a weird problem I encountered a week ago and thought I would share it. Apparently, some security software was removed from this person’s computer and it broke the network stack. It was McAfee I believe. In any case, here were the symptoms:
- No network adapters were listed in the Task Manager -> Networking tab
- An
ipconfigresulted in a blank listing – just “Windows IP Configuration” and no numbers or adapters shown - In the device manager, all network items have the “Yellow Exclamation point”, and they have a hyphen “-” after their names
- WAN Miniport (IP) was also listed in the same manner
Here’s how I fixed it:
- Make sure Device Manager is closed
- open regedit, find the following folder, back it up then delete it
- HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\Root\MS_PASSTHRUMP
- Go back into device manager and remove all network adapters
- do a device refresh… or reboot.
That fixed the problem for me. Hopefully this helps someone else!
