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Lost all my network adapters - network icon is X'ed out but still online

merk

Senior member
Windows 7 x64 - little backstory to explain how i got here...

This was a vista machine that i upgraded to Windows 7. Everything worked after the upgrade except for hamachi (version 1). I did a reinstall of that and it fixed it, except i had 2 hamachi network interfaces listed in device manager, one of which was showing up as broken (yellow exclamation mark). Since everything was working i left it alone.

Fast forward to today - i tried to upgrade hamachi to hamachi 2. Seemed to work ok but i couldn't connect to any peers. Looking into it it said the hamachi adapter was faulty and looking at my network connections there was no hamachi adapter listed.

I opened device manager and there was just one hamachi nic listed and it was the broken one. I selected uninstall - checked the box to remove the driver and it uninstalled.

I then manually installed another instance of the hamachi network adapter. Hamachi still cant connect to peers - same error msg about the network adapter.

Only now, ALL of my network adapters are missing in the network connections folder. And the network status icon in the status tray is showing a red X as though it's not connected, even though this PC is online (i'm connecting to it through RDP).

I've already tried rebooting - no effect. So any ideas where all my network connections/adapters went and how to get this all sorted?

One more piece of info - if i right click on the network icon in the status tray and select troubleshoot, having another problem, specific adapter - on that screen it then lists 3 network adapters. Tried letting it diagnose all of them but no effect.

And if i open the network connections folder and go to help, advanced options, i get an 'unexpected error'
 
So as a test i re-enabled the onboard NIC from the mobo. After re-enabling it, device manager indicated it was working. I then tried uninstalling it completely, including checking the option to uninstall drivers.

I downloaded the latest drivers and tried reinstalling the NIC after a reboot - now windows is saying it's not working.

So i'm really hesitant to uninstall the other NIC since i'm worried it too will also show up as not working and then i'll be screwed.
 
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