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.

3 Comments

  1. This post TOTALLY helped me out!!! Thank you so much, you saved my computers life… 🙂

  2. This has solved my problem as well. Any 3rd party network addons suc as that should be seen as a culprit when net flow is being restricted. Thank you for the straightforward answer.

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