Kris’s Box

Some random thoughts of a Training Professional

Unable to enable Wireless Adapter in Windows 7? blame Kaspersky

I recently encountered a pretty frustrating problem: on a laptop with Windows 7 installed, I could not enable the Wireless Adapter.

It was pretty weird: in Device Manager, everything looked good: the device was “working properly”. Yet I did not see any wireless networks. In Control Panel\Network and Internet\Network Connections, I noticed that the Wireless Adapter was disabled. I could right-click on it and select ‘Enable’, but that did not change the status: the Adapter stayed disabled.

Network Diagnostics reported there was an “unknown” problem with it. Not very helpful. I googled for hours, tried all kinds of things (disable/uninstall-reinstall/tried older versions of the driver/…) until finally I found this post which gave me a hint: apparently, Kaspersky anti-virus was the culprit! The Kaspersky NDIS filter caused the issue.

Process to solve it:

  1. Right-click the Wireless Adapter in Control Panel\Network and Internet\Network Connections, select Properties
  2. UNcheck Kaspersky Anti-Virus NDIS filter
  3. Select the Wireless Adapter, click Diagnose this device – to reset the adapter

Et voila, I (finally) had a working wireless connection again.

Tags: , ,

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 4th, 2010 at 22:16 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Unable to enable Wireless Adapter in Windows 7? blame Kaspersky”

  1. May 13th, 2010 at 03:14

    Zach says:

    I just wanted to share a tip:

    run -> ncpa.cpl

    will bring up the network connections

  2. July 19th, 2010 at 22:09

    Chris Couture says:

    This post TOTALLY helped me out!!! Thank you so much, you saved my computers life… :-)

Leave a Reply

Note: the comments are moderated. You will not see your comment immediately, but it should appear in the next couple of hours.

Spam Protection by WP-SpamFree Plugin

Switch to our mobile site