ipconfig is blank. completely.

[roont]

Anyone seen this before? When I do an ipconfig, it doesnt come up with any network adapter information. The Local Area Network, Network Adapter icon (in the system tray) says its connected but it obviously is not. The icons in Network Adapters (via control panel) disappear.

Today it was happening on a Lenovo T61 laptop, with Access Connections managing network connections. I see it come up every once in a while on users pc's (which the majority of are Thinkpads) and I can usually resolve it by going to device manager, uninstalling the network adapter, then rebooting and letting windows go through the whole "new hardware found". Then the adapters connect no problem. I was just wondering what might cause something like this.

[Igor_Kavinski]

I wrote a little program in C to parse a certain text file. To parse the file properly, the program expects each line to begin with the quote symbol and end with a quote symbol. If there is just one quote somewhere in any line between the starting and ending quotes, the whole program falls on its knees and gives nada for output, kinda like ipconfig is doing in your case. So my guess is that ipconfig hasn't been written to deal with error conditions gracefully.

[Igor_Kavinski]

Oh yeah. Here's another guess. I have often seen hardware disappear in Windows if it overheats. Maybe the network adapters in those Thinkpads are located near the toasty hard drive and fainting after getting uncomfortably warm?

[Nitrodist]

I've seen laptops do this when there isn't a connection made. The laptop was a HP 6730b and every time the Ethernet jack wasn't connected it wouldn't show up in the network connections. As soon as you connect it would show up (and in ipconfig as well). To me it seemed like it was a driver issue or a motherboard related driver or setting.

[highlandr]

We have seen that occasionally with some busted AV installs. Our antivirus installs a network component, and every now and then it breaks the network. If you look at the status of the connection, it shows connected, with 0 packets sent and 0 received.

I usually reinstall the AV software, but I guess reinstalling the network adapter would probably work too.

BTW, this is on machines that are hardwired to the network, so they're obviously connected.

[ludi]

What happens if you do an ipconfig /all command? Same result?