If you are unlucky, one day you will encounter a situation were your Windows 10 network seems to be completely gone without any prior warnings.
Here a steps to remedy this issue. All the steps should be done on safe-mode or safe-mode with networking. You can get to safe-mode by pressing either F7 or F8 directly after booting your machine.
Notice. While booting your computer into safe-mode with networking. Do not attach any network cable.
Sign in should accept your user credentials at this point.
Symptoms of the issue:
All network cards are malfunctioning. They are either in a state of being disabled or status is “Windows is still trying to install software” or equivalent.
Solution:
Open regedit or command prompt and enable msiserver on safe-mode. When msiserver is enabled, you can proceed to uninstall/modify your software.
Command prompt version – Run these commands as an administrator on cmd. If you prever GUI use regedit and add similar entry via it.
REG ADD “HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SafeBoot\Network\MSIServer” /VE /T REG_SZ /F /D “Service”
Next, open cmd as an administrator and execute:
net start msiserver
At this point proceed to uninstall software that might cause issues to Windows.
First, check if you have installed anything strange. Also, check if there are any new driver updates.
Remove anything that seems out of place or suspicious. If you have VirtualBox installed, consider removing it first. VirtualBox has sometimes caused trouble to Windows networking with its adapters.
At this point reboot your machine, and return to safe-mode.
If network is still stuck, check if you have any VPNs installed. Start removing your VPN installations one by one and reboot the machine after each VPN removal. There is a good change that some VPN you are were using prior to your issues, has malfunctioned and removing it will get your network connectivity working again.
Why do these things happen in the first place?
Usually network cards start malfunctioning when some Windows upgrade or driver upgrade goes wrong. These things can happen from time to time since the quality of software components and their drivers might vary. Usually these things are rare, so most of the Windows users should be safe from havoc.