TAP-Win32 adapter does not show up under ipconfig

[geziefer]

Hello,

the following strange situation happened to me after installing openVPN on a newly setup WinXP Pro SP3.
I used openVPN in version 2.0.9 quite a time before without problems, but after the new installation, the TAP-Win32 adapter was shown in the network environment, but did not with "ipconfig /all", which prevented the connection to work with the error message, that it could not find the adapter and thus could not assign an IP address.
After several de/installations, reboots, trying newer versions and following workarounds from other posts we finally solved it by temporarily bridging the adapter with the regular LAN adapter and immediately deleting the bridge again - and after that it showed in ipconfig and the VPN connection worked!
While I'm happy to have a working VPN again, I'm still in need for an explanation what may have caused the problem - any ideas?

Regards, Alex