Today I'm going to post a solution of a weird problem which I faced yesterday. When I updated the driver of my network card and restarted my computer system, I faced a strange problem.

Suddenly the "Network Connection" icon in system tray started showing a yellow triangle with exclamation mark (!) on it as shown in following screenshot:

I double-checked the Internet connectivity and it was working absolutely fine. I was able to browse on Internet.

To investigate the issue, I checked the Network Connections folder, it was empty. It was not showing any network adapter. It was absolutely blank as shown in following screenshot:

I did lots of things to fix the issue like restarting the router, enabling/disabling network services but all in vain.

At last I tried resetting network adapters configuration using Windows registry and it did the trick. I was able to fix this annoying issue using my favorite Registry Editor. Actually Windows stores a cache of network adapters configuration in registry and if by any chance the cache becomes corrupted, you might face such kind of strange issues.

Anyway I'm sharing the solutions here so that if anyone else faces this problem, he'll be able to fix it easily without any hard work.

To fix this issue, you just need to follow these simple steps:

METHOD 1:

1. Type regedit in RUN or Start search box and press Enter. It'll open Registry Editor.

2. Now go to following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Network

3. In right-side pane, you'll see a binary key "Config". Select it and press Delete key on your keyboard. You just need to delete Config key.

Don't worry. When you delete the key and open Network Connections folder or restart your system, Windows automatically re-creates the key. By deleting the key we are just clearing the configuration cache.

4. Once you delete the key, close Registry Editor and open Network Connections folder again and now it should show all network adapters without any problem.

PS: If you don't want to edit registry manually and want a ready-made registry script to do the task automatically, download following ZIP file, extract it and run extracted REG file. It'll ask for confirmation, accept it:

Download Registry Script

METHOD 2:

If the above mentioned method doesn't work for you, try following solution given by our reader "Campbell":

1. Open Device Manager using devmgmt.msc command and locate the Network adapters.

2. Right-click on each network adapter one bye one and select Uninstall.

3. Once all have been removed, right-click again and select Scan for hardware changes.

The adapters will be rediscovered and when the drivers are loaded back, the devices will re-appear in Network Connections.

METHOD 3:

If none of the above mentioned methods work for you, try following solution given by our reader "Rusty":

1. Type regedit in RUN or Start search box and press Enter. It'll open Registry Editor.

2. Now go to following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Network\Connections

3. In right-side pane, you'll see a multi-string key "ClassManagers". Double-click on it and it'll open the edit dialog box to change its value.

4. The dialog box will contain 4 GUIDs and each GUID must present on a separate line. If you find that all GUIDs are present in a single line, put them on separate lines by pressing Enter key after each closing curly bracket '}'.

For your convenience, we are providing the correct value of the key. Copy following text and paste it in the edit dialog box:

{B4C8DF59-D16F-4042-80B7-3557A254B7C5}
{BA126AD3-2166-11D1-B1D0-00805FC1270E}
{BA126AD5-2166-11D1-B1D0-00805FC1270E}
{BA126ADD-2166-11D1-B1D0-00805FC1270E}

After correcting the value, click on OK button to apply changes.

5. That's it. Close Registry Editor and open Network Connections folder again and now it should show all network adapters without any problem.

PS: If you are not familiar with modifying registry, you can download