Here are some insights you haven't seen in this thread yet:
Microsoft's forum monitor, Swwathi B's answer is NOT the correct answer. His answer assumes that Microsoft is doing everything correct and this NOT the case. His fix doesn't work for most of us according to the responses in this thread.
I don't have the final answer, but I am hoping that this response will lead directly to the solution of the problem which MAY be right at our fingertips. So here is what I have come up with:
I want as many of you as possible to investigate and respond in this note thread to the following test scenario:
- make sure you have a wireless adapter installed, enabled, and working according to the DeviceManager>>Network Adapters>>(your problem wireless adapter).
1) Look in the announcement icon group section that is usually in the lower right hand corner of your windows 7 screen on the right side of the task bar where all the announcement icons are usually located. Most of you should find an icon for either the LAN
or WAN network which usually looks either like a bar chart indicator of WiFi signal strength or a the terminal screen icon of a LAN connection.
- Right click on this icon and select "trouble shoot problems".
- drill down through the trouble shooting dialog process looking for a message which says something like: "There might be a problem with the driver for the wireless Network Connection adapter".
- on the same page as this message in the troubleshooting process you will likely see a link which says: "View detailed information"...click on it.
- There will be several sections which you can expand and somewhere on this list you will probably see the explination for the "problem with the driver" message described above.
- If I am right, many of you will see the message: "Windows couldn't automatically bind the IP protocol stack to the network adapter".
(NOW that is a very nice message and what it REALLY*means is the Microsoft has screwed up the IP protocol binding interface so that it can't tell the wireless addapter what wireless routers are out there)*Now after poking around a bit I stumbled on the fact that Microsoft has something called Network Monitor 3 which analyzes the the IP binding to the LAN or WAN, and on the WAN side Microsoft's documentation points out that versions 1 and 2 will not work
under Windows 7 and what happens is guess what? Thats right, the IP addresses won't properly bind to the wireless adapters.
(Please note that there a few other problems floating around such as the protocol for the wireless connection power down stuff, but a protocol is a protocol, and this should all be fixed in the same place that all protocols are spelled out...this problem may
have crept up on us because the N protocol was not finalized, and I don't know if it is even now...which might have been the source of much of the problem in the first place. Also, the claimed "fact" that some routers may not work because of powerdown protocol
in Windows 7 is just so much ignorant BS of some fancy protocol designer...wireless routers shouldn't know ANYTHING about power down protocols. There should be a generic hook in the communications protocol that takes care of these sorts of things without
caring about the nature of the devices at either end....if such a "power down protocol" exists in the communcations thread, it is just bad modularization which contaminates commuciations with concerns about device specific behaviors, and as such may be part
of what has led to kind of problems we are seeing. Such modularization violations lead to large number of special causes and it is exactly this kind of programming that leads to huge numbers of unintended consequences.)
Now I also notice that most of the newer computers that have been coming out since GA on Windows 7 have internal wireless adapters already built in and hmmmm...interesting to all of us is that they WORK! That suggests that the IP binding problem has been fixed
and an appropriate fix exists...but may not have been bundled with Windows 7 at GA or integrated into the update system. Obviously there could be a download or an update that is needed through Windows Update.
I also noticed that one of my old applications which I re-installed in Windows 7 sucked in Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1, whatever that is, and that there is a Framework 3.5 as well as a beta Framework 4.0 or something like that. Now this is Application development
software so it may not be exactly what we are looking for but obviously it CONTAINS what we want including something in the same version series of the network wireless software. There has to be a download which is the right hook for what ails us and that
is what we now need to find. Again, it obviously exists because the computer venders could be delivering working windows 7 wireless networking on their systems. Whatever it is, it should straighten out all the concerns we are having with wireless network
since what we are looking for should handle all the protocols that are not being handled right and messing us all up.
Also I have gone to Trendnet with their 2010 version of their USB wireless Adapters which seem to have the problem, but after talking to the level 2 techs we investigated all the nook and corners and I led them to the IP Protocol binding problem. This is the
TEW-649UB and once the problem is solved it may be one of the best 802.11n dongles around because wireless USB dongles have a bad reputation for burning up after a short time, and Trendnet has a 3 year limited warrently on the device which means you will good
for go for at least 3 years on a type of product which has a reputation of burning out after a few months. (My source on the usb dongle burn out problem was confirmed by repair techies at several stores: Micro Center, Frys Electronics, and Best Buys).
So back to the story, at that time they told me that they have seen that many Windows 7 64x machines work and the problem we are all seeing is happening on a fair number of the Windows 7 64x machines. They said they had the TEW-649UB windows 7 certified for
64x (ha ha!) and working on the 64x machines except the ones that are having the Windows 7 problems we are seeing. Their analysis, in a general way, supports the conclusions I suggest in this note, they said that it is not the PC hardware or adapters, but
that the problem is in Windows 7 software, and that I should look to Microsoft for the answer...I agree with that completely, which is what led me to this forum.
So I ask that you people do a few things:
A) Lets try to confirm or deny my results about the IP binding being the main culperate, so please check to see if most of you are having the IP binding problem.
B) Whether or not you are having the problem, there is still a good chance that there is a network protocol binding software bind update that we all need. Poke around and see if you can find a link to the right download to fix Windows 7 for us all. Be aware
that if it is the .NET Framework stuff that it is possible to have more than one version on the same machine so if you have old software that has to used older versions (as I have), that doesn't keep you from installing newer version which can exist on the
same machine at the same time.
C) Bug the Microsoft network analysts and point them to this response, and get them on the job to fix this problem, while focusing on the direction I am pointing out...pick on Swathi B in particular and make sure he reads this note.
I know the first thing I am going to do is look for a run time of .NET Framework or its cousins which is version 3.5 or later. It may or may not be the right hook, but the righ hook is somewhere in that nick of the woods. If you people can confirm my findings
with some successes over the next 24 hours or so, I will come back and post the solution as an answer to this problem.
Cross your fingers people, we may get this solved very soon!
---John
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