Had an interesting problem this morning which while not difficult to fix took up a lot of time investigating.
Yesterday the laptop was working perfectly fine, connecting to the internet via the wireless connector. This morning the wireless connector failed to make a connection to the hub. Very strange, but even more so when all other PC devices were working fine, and even the plugged in network adaptor was failing to make a connection. Running the command line ‘ipconfig’ command didn’t even display the network adaptors as existing!
Looking at the network adaptors didn’t show anything unusual in the control panel. They were present and enabled and running fine. However the network trouble-shooter said there were problems with the adaptors but couldn’t say what was wrong. A fat lot of use they turned out to be.
Looking at the system activity the only events that I could see were that yesterday afternoon I upgraded ‘Tortoise SVN’ to the latest 1.8.1 version and this morning it looked like ‘Trusteer Rapport’ had also updated itself. Now the machine was fine after the Tortoise upgrade, and presumably the network connection must have been fine if Rapport had upgraded itself.
Uninstalling ‘Rapport’ did not resolve the problem, so tried using System restore to a point prior to the ‘Rapport’ update, but this also failed to resolve the problem. At this point I decided to uninstall the two network devices (using Device Manager), and then use the ‘discover new hardware’ option to reinstall them. Surprise, surprise the main network adaptor suddenly started working. At last a clue.
I then proceeded to perform system restore again to the latest point and then uninstalled, and rediscovered the adaptors. The main network adaptor worked straight away, but because I had obviously removed the wireless connector details, all of the ‘automatic’ connection details for the adaptor also were lost, so it was necessary to re-enter the connection keys etc.
So the only thing I can conclude from this is that the ‘Trusteer Rapport’ (version 3.5.1208.41) must somehow have impacted the network adaptors, something which even uninstalling didn’t resolve. For those unfamiliar with Rapport it is security software that is used to protect secure sites such as banks etc. Quite why it should impact the network adaptors is not quite so clear. Searching on the web didn’t discover anything similar reported but then again perhaps it is still ‘new’ and nobody else has reported it yet?