How to reinstall missing WAN PPTP and L2TP Miniports.

[rmusset]

The PC under Windows 2000 SP4 has 1 netwokk card with
TCPIP installed and functionning fine... but the Network
Wizzard does not propose any more the VPN connections
(grayed buttons). The attempt to start the "PptpMiniport"
device gives error :
"Unable to start service "PptpMiniport". The service has
no enabled devices associated with it."
The Device Manager (with show hidden enabled) shows in the
Network Adapters WAN section only the "WAN Miniport (IP)"
and "WAN Miniport (IP) - Packet Schedule Manager" and NO
the PPTP and L2TP WAN Miniports that disappered...
How to get back these 2 ports without reinstalling the
whole Windows system ?

Thanks for any help.

 

[Richard Moreno]

Hi-

Did you try uninstalling the NIC and then letting HW Wizard redetect your
NIC again and reinstall the drivers?

 

[John Lewis]

Reinstalling the NIC will NOT fix the problem, or at least it didn't in my
case. I recently went through hell with several W2K SP4 machines. Couldn't
get a VPN connection to fire up, got lots of 619 errors and sometimes 1717
(which is 'unknown interface'). Removing SP4 and regressing to SP3 fixed
it. Had to have SP4 for a couple of programs to run. Oddly, I can't
reproduce this with any level of consistency, seems to be a problem with
about 65% of the machines that I took to SP4 in the process.

I noticed several others posting with the same or similar problem, but no
answers. MS KB, technet, etc useless. By comparing logs of a good
connection on SP3 with logs of the bad connection, I determined that the
enumeration of the miniports was messed up somewhere in SP4 install. This
is where it gets real similar. I removed the miniports through cut and
hack, uninstalled all of the network protocols then the actual adapters and
rebooted, thinking that reinstalling the card an TCP/IP from the Windows CD
would regenerate the miniports. It did reinstall the IP miniport, but not
the others, so I really don't think that will work.

At the end of the day, my solution was to perform a clean install of Windows
(my CDs are SP2), install SP3, then SP4, then MS updates one at a time.
Works fine. I also tried a repair install and an upgrade install, both of
which did not help at all. Also tried new install, SP3, SP4, then all of
the updates from the web in one session. That worked up through the SP4
installation, but went back to the original problem when I installed all of
the web updates at once. I was able to simply back them out and install one
at a time and all was well again, but on all of the problem machines since I
have just installed them one at a time the first time around. It would
probably be safe to skip SP3, but I did it just so I could roll SP4 off if I
needed to and still have at least SP3 -- the programs will run on SP3 but
will only install on SP4.

Sorry for the lengthy post and the lack of good news, but I googled and hit
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/ to death and didn't find any better answers.