Dissapearign NIC, not hardware, puzzled. Teredo?

S

silkshadow

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Aug 9, 2010
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This is an HTPC. Its older and not used much. Its in a guest room. I have relatives coming for the Christmas holidays so am running though and making sure all my house tech works. Its on a Asus A8N-SLI SE and was using the mobo NIC. While, as you will see, hardware is probably not relevant, I'd be happy to post the full specs if anyone thinks it might be relevant. Its running Win7 32bit.

Here's the scenario. I booted the PC up 2 weeks ago, it was working fine. Win update complained that it needed a ton of updates, so I let it run. Win update finished and I rebooted. My security app, Outpost security suite, nagged me that it needed an update. It was a major update from v6 to v7. I did the update and shut the PC off. I did not do a followup test unfortunately. These are the only things I changed.

Went back to it this weekend, doing a final run though my place to make sure all the guest rooms were operational. Booted this PC up and no network, the icon had a red 'X'. I checked device manager and the NIC was gone but there was this thing called Teredo which was giving me a error code 10. Did some google found out what teredo was.

This puzzled me, as I have IPv6 turned off (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\tcpip6\Parameters\) as well as unchecking IPv6 in the NIC properties. Anyway,

'netsh interface teredo set state disabled'

then rebooted. Teredo is now disabled but my NIC is still not there. So I uninstall Teredo and reboot. Now I have no NIC in device manager at all (teredo was considered a NIC by DevMan). Crud, so I reboot, disable the onboard NIC in bios and boot. Then reboot and enable the NIC in bios. NIC is back, yay. Turn off the PC.

Came back to it on Sunday to see if everything is still ok. Its not, boot up and no NIC. So I think may be its hardware. So I have a ton of PCI NICs so I swap one in. Install the driver and reboot, NIC is there and network is up. Turn off the PC. Turn it back on, no NICs again.

This goes on for a bit, I tested the NIC in another computer and ran the broadcom diagnostic app on it (that comes with the card), its working fine. I reinstalled teredo, enabled and disabled the mobo NIC, tried multiple NICs (dlink, huawei, zte) etc. Nothing is stable, the NICs will install and the network will be up then on reboot it will disappear. Uninstalling and reinstalling teredo has no effect. Its always errored when enabled (probably because I have disabled IPv6).

I am stumped! Does anyone have any ideas to try? Thank you for any assistance here!

Edit: See down the thread, seems Outpost is the problem. :(
 
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I would go back and uninstall all those Windows updates, then one at a time narrow it down. Maybe someone here knows exactly whats it is and will chime in.
 
Did you enable view hidden devices in device manager? It may lead to some clues as to what is going on.
 
Thanks for the replies!

@jay2472000, you suspect its a win update? Was this teredo thing in an update? Yuk, I hate sorting through win updates to find a culprit but what you say makes a lot of sense, guess I have to do it.

@Demon10000, that is a really good idea mate. No, I didn't think of it. I will do it as soon as I get back home and see if its maybe hidden.

Thanks guys, guess I have more trouble shooting to do.
 
Hi,

I would also say one of your updates. did you install any new updates for your hardware for the PC? That is where I would check first.

MnR
 
Thanks! No, I did not install any new drivers. There were a bunch in recommended updates in win update but, knowing what a problem they can cause, I did not install any of them. Also there was no hidden network adapter drivers.

Unfortunately I did not have a roll back/system restore point and my backup was from a long time ago and would require a ton of elbow work to update and reconfigure the HTPC client app on there. Apparently, because this is a rarely used HTPC, I turned it all off to save space or something. No clue what I was thinking.

So I tried to uninstall updates one by one but after uninstalling one of the updates the system became extremely unstable and gave BSODs a few seconds after boot.

I've given it up for a bad deal. I really don't have the time anymore to reinstall the OS and everything, so I have to put it off till January. Guess my cousins won't be getting TV in their room. :D

I'm still totally flummoxed on what has caused this. :confused: Windows is always a PIA but this one is one of the stranger bugs I've seen.
 
It's Outpost causing your issues. Check the forums, you'll see all sorts of people reporting the same thing after updating to v7. And from what I can tell, it may not be easy to fix. Best bet is to remove Outpost, remove and reinstall your NIC drivers, then try something like MSE.
 
Thank you very much for your reply!

Ah crud, I actually abandoned Outpost a while back because it caused a no-boot problem with my gaming keyboard: http://outpostfirewall.com/forum/showthread.php?p=170872#post170872.

Outpost support was unresponsive and useless to that problem, as I noted in that thread. I made that red so if anyone runs into this via google looking for info on buying Outpost, they see that prominently.

I switched to Kaspersky, but then my licenses ran out and I couldn't find a deal for a multi-machine license again (I originally took advantage of a switching deal Kaspersky was offering).

Since I bought lifetime family license for Outpost, I tried it again and the old bug was gone. So I replaced Kaspersky with Outpost on all my LAN machines. I have to say its been running fine on my other machines. I was nervous when they forced the update to 7 and I waited till a 2nd version of 7 came out before I agreed to update.

I have to say that on my other machines it didn't cause any serious problems. I didn't see this Teredo thing. However, when I was googling for Teredo, there was some mention of Zonealarm and people needed to uncheck IPv6 in Zonealarm's setting to fix it. I didn't think about that, since I am not running Zonealarm, but now that you say Outpost is the culprit, it makes total sense :(.

MSE seems like a good recommendation for this machine, as its going to be rarely used.
 
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