Tuesday, November 24, 2009

CISCO VPN Client Error message "Reason 442: Failed to Enable Virtual Adapter"

Problem Description: When users will try to establish VPN connection that cannot establish a connection. A pop-up message will apper with error message "Reason 442: Failed to Enable Virtual Adapter". If you are looking at the status bar of the VPN client you will see this pop-up appearing after VPN client was showing "Securing communication channel..."





Cause: Problem with the network adapter configuration that VPN client uses, some time it does not get disabled because someone might have closed laptop and it didn't get terminated properly.





Fix: There are usually two things that work for me


Fix1: Disable "Local Area Connection (x)" that is created and used by CISCO VPN Client. Following are steps on how to do this:





Windows XP:


1. Navigate to network connections by selecting Start >Settings > Control Panel > Network Connections


2. Set the view to show you details (Select 'View' menu on the top and select 'Details')


3. Under Device name column one should be able to see which Local Area Connection is used by CISCO Client. Here is a screenshot:





4. Right click on Local Area Connection that is used by VPN client and disable it (if its already enabled).

5. In case Local Area Connection used by VPN client is disabled then select repair.

FIX 2: This has to do with Windows VISTA specificly.

****COMING SOON****




2 comments:

Kevin said...

I found a workaround for my issue which allowed this fix to work for me. I'm using version 5.0.07.0290 on Windows XP Home Edition, sp3 with McAfee antivirus. When I tried the fix that involved enabling vpn adaptor, setting tcp/ip to auto config, and then selecting repair, the message I would get is that it couldn't repair because tcp/ip wasn't enabled. I found out that by bridging the vpn with my hardware network adapter and then unbridging it, I was then able to do the repair on the vpn adaptor, and the connection now works again. Hope that helps.

Rajan Katwal said...

Thanks Kevin. I am sure it will help others who might run into the same issue.

Amazingly I were running the similar configuration including the AV software from the same vendor.