Today I'm going to post a solution of a weird problem which I faced yesterday. Yesterday I updated driver of my network card and when I restarted my system, I faced a strange problem.
Suddenly the network connection icon in system tray started showing a yellow exclamation mark on it as shown in following screenshot:
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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 and to my surprise, it was empty. It was not showing network adapters list. It was absolutely blank:

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 solution 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:
1. Type regedit in RUN or start menu 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:
This article was posted by VG in following section: Troubleshooting, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP.
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Omar
thnx
C_3PO
I must admit, that's a new one on me! Then again I have never worked on two PC's with exactly the same problems! :-P
Nitin Banker
hi,
how can i browse free internet on pc?
Any idea!
I m using airtel.
nipunb
hey VG, I'm having a problem and maybe you can suggest a fix, recently I installed comodo firewall on my XP SP3, but after installing it, my windows as well as tune up utilities both started to show warning that there is no firewall turned on. But the comodo firewall is working correctly, so why it can't be read by windows and tune up..... right now, I have hid both the warning messages but plz suggest a permanent fix for this.....
VG
^^ You can do nothing except hiding the message. It might be possible that Comodo firewall is unknown to both of them. ;)
nipunb
ok thnx for the reply... :)
btw can you suggest any firewall program better than comodo???
P S ARAVIND
Hi Vishal,
I too have a weird problem similar to the above mentioned one.
When I'm not connected to a Wired Network, the icon of the Ethernet adapter goes missing in the Network Connections Window instead of showing the icon with a Red X on it. I even tried the above workaround to no avail
soldier
@nipunb Comodo firewall asks you if you want to disable windows firewall to avoid conflicts.comodo defiently works on 7 it doesn't display any no fire wall warnings but on xp i think you have to disable the alerts for firewall
sasja
thanks,
I thought It was up to me.
now I can see all connections.
ngyikp
Why is your network name called WARNING!!! ? :)