OpenVPN Connect - TAP-Win32 Adapter Problems

[drewsonian]

Hi,

I had OpenVPN Connect working perfectly on my laptop earlier this week, but I had to reformat my computer and now when I install it, the program says that it's connected to my VPN (which I can connect to on other computers), but I can't reach anything on the other side of the VPN. I think it has to do with the TAP-Win32 adapter driver, because when I click "Details" in the Local Area Connection 2 status, there are absolutely no properties or values listed - the entire window is blank. This doesn't happen on other computers that I have installed OpenVPN Connect on in the last day.

The only thing I can think is that there's a network driver conflict somewhere. I had Intel PRO/Set installed and removed it, but the issue didn't clear up. I have network drivers for these interfaces currently installed. I have wifi, but uninstalled the driviers to see if it was potentially conflicting.
Intel(R) 82577LM Gigabit Network Connection
Dell Bluetooth adapter

Any ideas? The only other things I've done to the laptop is install the latest drivers when I loaded from scratch and upgraded the BIOS. I'm running a Dell Latitude E6510.

Thank you,
Drew

[drewsonian]

Update:

So, since I've fixed computers most of my life, I usually assume that Windows buttons like "Diagnose" are worthless... and mostly I think they are... but that aside, Windows did detect the following about the TAP-Win32 Adapter:

"There might be a problem with the driver for the Local Area Connection 2 adapter" (duh)
"Windows couldn't automatically bind the IP protocol stack to the network adapter." - (I haven't seen this one before)

"Set up the 'Local Area Connection 2' adapter" "Not run"
"Set up the network adapter to communicate with this network. This ensures that both Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4) and Internet Protocol Version 6 (TCP/IPv6) can be used on the network adapter. "


I tried to have it resolve the issue using Administrator credentials, but it tried to find the device driver automatically and came back with "No driver found"

Any ideas or suggestions on where to go from here?

Thanks!

[drewsonian]

I have continued hunting and researching and found that if I uninstalled the Citrix DNE Lightweight service from all network adapters, it began to work. So, this wasn't related to OpenVPN, but the first sympton appeared with it somehow.

[novaflash]

That is a very interesting problem. Glad you were able to solve it, and thank you for posting the solution here.

I am just wondering though if you were using an up-to-date OpenVPN Connect Client, version 1.8.3.347 or higher..?

[drewsonian]

I was using version 1.8.4.200

[novaflash]

Thanks for letting me know.

[luckman212]

I think there might be a similar (related) problem with the VirtualBox Bridged Networking Driver (gets installed with VirtualBox) -- I am not sure yet but I am having the same kind of issue, tracking it over here and the only thing that "fixes" it is kind of re-installing the TAP driver. That kick-starts it and gets it going again. I have not tried totally uninstalling all 3rd party drivers as that's not really an option for me. Not sure if just unbinding them (unchecking the boxes in the TAP adapter properties) would have any effect.

[drewsonian]

I think there might be a similar (related) problem with the VirtualBox Bridged Networking Driver (gets installed with VirtualBox) -- I am not sure yet but I am having the same kind of issue, tracking it over here and the only thing that "fixes" it is kind of re-installing the TAP driver. That kick-starts it and gets it going again. I have not tried totally uninstalling all 3rd party drivers as that's not really an option for me. Not sure if just unbinding them (unchecking the boxes in the TAP adapter properties) would have any effect.

When I was doing my research, the only reason I even tried to disable the Citrix DNE driver was because I found an obscure post that I don't recall the link to where someone had a similar issue with drivers related to the acronym NDIS. I think I found that in the Citrix DNE somewhere. Anyways, you might try disabling the NDIS items in your list, but I'm no expert.