Vista Wireless Notworking

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(What follows is aimed at those people for whom Vista Wireless Networking might seem better named Vista Wireless Notworking. It is particularly aimed at people who are tearing their hair out at the roots in total frustration. If that's you - read on...)

Okay, so there I was until last weekend and my wifi on Vista was working pretty great. At home it had been stable, and when roaming I was able to connect pretty reliably to any hotspot that was available, given authorisation. I have roamed at local pubs, airports, workplaces and other people's homes. All with few problems.

And then last weekend I needed to access via Cellular/mobile phone since I would not be near wifi. This was a challenge and a half, and one that took me a couple of days to sort out. But that is not the purpose of this posting.

No, the purpose of this post is the cataclysm that I returned to on trying to reconnect to my wireless setup when back at home. Basically I couldn't.

Yes, I could see various wireless networks as being available, including my own. But do what I might try Vista simply gave up the ghost on attempting to connect as if my WiFi wasn't working. Bear in mind my laptop is relatively new. Bear in mind that around 3 months ago I had reinstalled Vista (for other reasons). Also bear in mind I consider myself fluent in Windows networking. So to meet this brick wall as a horrible shock.

Two days later I was still pulling my hair out, reading a variety of posts, including this thread on Puffbox and this thread on EveryJoe and this thread on Cnet forums and this thread on ChicagoTech and many more across the web, all to no avail.

Some of these talk of other computers connecting fine, typically Windows XP (implying that most things are ok - and that Vista has its own problem). I have various Linux and XP boxes and these were indeed connecting fine. So, like many others my Vista was its own problem.

After trying lots and lots of ideas, in the end it seemed the ONLY final solution offered by my research was to reinstall Vista. That is not a step I wanted to take.

The less severe step of uninstalling and reinstalling service pack 1 is indicated on many forums and blogs. I could not reinstall SP1, believe me I tried. But because I keep my disk clean I had intentionally deleted my pre-SP1 files, so that process was not open to me.

In fact I had only reinstalled Vista 3 months ago, I guess. My computer is relatively new. The idea of reinstalling was not an option I wanted.

Through this trauma I had been through some interesting stuff. I had entered the command "neth winsock reset" and rebooted more times than is good for my sanity. In a similar vein I had deleted the Winsock and Winsock2 registry keys, and rebooted.

I had even removed wifi driver and reinstalled until it got to the point of not installing properly! So I was in a fine mess.

I had also played around with registry values DhcpConnForceBroadcastFlag and the like as documented at this Microsoft kb page.

More severe and underlying problems were indicated by various "automatic" start services that not only seemed to be not running but also could not be started. This includes a critical service (imo) for debugging, the event log and probably of more pertinence to my problem, wlansvc.

Wlanscv the one that enables Windows to detect and report on wifi devices such as adsl wireless routers etc. Trying to start this service balked at some dependent service not running and some obscure, and totally meaningless error message. You know, the kind of c**p message that says, "I know a secret and I am keeping it to myself, so there!"

Actually when checking all the dependencies they were all running! The plot thickens.

The services it depends on are Extensible Authentication Protocol, Native WiFi Filter, NDIS Usemode I/O Protocol and Remote Procedure (RPC). Anyway, I simply reduced this to three by removing the dependency on NDIS Usemode I/O Protocol, rebooted and the service started up perfectly.

Not only did it startup, it also worked! So lo, and behold there was my wifi detecting various routers and other wireless devices again.

At this point I was back to my original problem. I had recovered my networking by some sculduggery, and certainly without reinstalling SP1. But I still was not connecting.

So I was a bit further in the sense that I feel I understand some of how to get wifi playing ball. I just did not know how to score THE goal that wins the game.

Now I had already applied the reghack to stop Vista from being too clever for its own good regarding DHCP with registry value DhcpConnForceBroadcastFlag etc. (Where Vista tries to optimise for new and clever routers and at the same time failing on the vast bulk of old fashioned routers out there in the real world.)

In fact having destroyed and somehow rebuilt my basic wifi setup I had to reapply that hack. Just in case. However that did not help me. Neither did it hinder.

So what next?

Well I read a post that another too-clever trick is around Windows Scaling for wifi connections. To disable this I switched off auto-tuning also with the netsh command. Reboot and there still was no connection. Yes, I could still see my router, but no connection.

My final salvation was this.

I read a post on another subject. It seems that to connect to any router or other device Vista needs a "wireless profile". Now under many, perhaps most circumstances Vista creates this wireless profile automatically. But in my instance, and my guess for a lot of other frustrated Vista users, and ex-Vista users it did not create this profile automatically.

As it turns out, no wireless profile means no connection.

To create a wireless profile go to control panel, and then network and sharing center. Now on the left menu you should see "Manage Wireless Connections", so click on this. In the following dialog box at the left side click on the ADD button to add a profile and complete this suitable for your router or wifi connection, including for example whether and what type of wifi security you have in place. Oh, and you might want to click the "connect automatically" checkbox.

Once this profile was complete my wifi started connecting perfectly as if there had never been a problem. It really did.

In one sense I cannot believe the final solution was so simple. In another sense I knew my setup was correct in many ways. After all it had been working fine.

Now I am not saying my steps are going to solve all your problems. But give them a go and let me know if they help.

One final point. Probably the "cause" of the problem was changing my setup to be able to use dial-up to the over mobile phone. This setup had been problematic. But it should not have disturbed my wifi connection.