Windows 10 says I have no internet connection, but I have.

GrogsterNZasked; I would also be interested to know if that is also the case for other VPN providers like NORD for example.

I had the same problem with Nord VPN. When I switched off the VPN, the globe icon went away.

What I did to fix it was changed the VPN protocol from NordLynx to OpenVPN (TCP).  However, OpenVPN (UDP), fixed the problem as well.

I have(with Tom's help via PM's) figured out what was causing the issue in MY machine.  This is a conclusive result - it really WAS this, and no amount of tinkering with keys in the registry fixed it thus far.  The cause in my case, was VirtualSheild VPN.  Turn it off with the globe icon showing, the globe almost instantly vanishes and is replaced with the normal connection icon.

If  you are running a VPN but ESPECIALLY VirtualSheild, turn it off/shut it down and see if that fixes your globe icon.

It would seem that VirtualSheild anyway, does something there that is affecting the connect-test servers from doing their thing.

As soon as I restart VirtualSheild, about ten minutes later, the globe icon is back again.  Shut down VirtualSheild again, and the globe vanishes and you get the standard connection icon back.  I can repeat this at will, so it is definitely VirtualSheild causing MY issues.

But purely out of interest, I would love to hear from any members who have this globe icon issue - and also use VirtualSheild.  For those members, shut-down your copy of VirtualSheild and see if that solves your problems.  I am reasonably confident that it will.

I still use my VirtualSheild, but when I NEED to have W10 know it is online such as in the MS Store etc, I just kill VirtualSheild, and seconds later, I have the normal connection icon in the taskbar.

I would also be interested to know if that is also the case for other VPN providers like NORD for example.

Oh, and yes - I am using the most up to date version of VirtualSheild, so it is not cos it was an old version or something like that, but it really does seem to be the root cause of all MY globe icon issues.

Thanks for the suggestions Tom, I looked into them a bit, but no progress yet. Is there no way to get detailed/debug logging out of NCSI?

There's no fancy network gateway or proxying going on, just a plain routers from the ISP which have always worked just fine.

I'm fairly sure I don't have something installed which is filtering/dropping the dns packets, nslookup works fine. I don't think it's a dns issue. I use a custom dns server on localhost and this has worked fine for years. Looking at the dns server logs i can see that there are active probe dns lookups now and then, maybe once a week on average, it's very irregular. If having a custom dns setup breaks NCSI then why was this never an issue before the 2004 update.

Regarding the MinimumInternetHopCount, I had not heard about that registry key before, so I ran another Wireshark trace while Windows claimed no internet access, and 99% of packets have TTL greater than 8 (filter ip.ttl > 8), so I don't see why decreasing that to 3 is going to make any difference.

The reason it seems to me that this is a bug/regression in NCSI is that this issue began immediately with the Windows 10 2004 update. I held off installing that update on the 3rd machine I use, but eventually Windows decided to update anyway and then suddenly that machine had the same issues as well. Everything else which doesn't rely on the NCSI status still works fine.

Looking at the NCSI event log, lots of entries with the status SuspectDnsProbeFailed and ActiveHttpProbeFailed are logged when there are network adapter status changes. Running "Invoke-WebRequest http://www.msftconnecttest.com/connecttest.txt" in powershell responds in less than 1 second with the expected content "Microsoft Connect Test", so not sure why it thinks the active http probe is also failing.

Occasionally there are PassivePacketHops entries, and then Windows does claim to be connected, at least for a while, even though there are several of the other 2 status entries right after it. Even though there are lots of entries logged, nothing is captured by wireshark (on all interfaces), there are 0 packets matching that filter for NCSI traffic. The requests from powershell and nslookups always show up immediately, but nothing else.

Anything else to check? How can I find out why NCSI is not actually sending anything at all even though it claims to be doing the active checks.

I don't think running that netsh trace will help since that's too late in the pipeline and probably won't give any new insights.