Windows 7 – “Identifying Network” (Resolved)

I was at a friends house last weekend. I found a very interesting problem with Windows 7. They had a laptop they just purchased in Taiwan, and no matter how they tried to connect it to their network, it would always say “Identifying Network”:

Now, in the screen shot it is the wireless network, but this was happening with a direct connection to the router as well.

After some digging and poking at the machine I determined that it was not picking up an IP address from DHCP. It turns out that this is actually an issue in Vista too.

Microsoft has a soloution: KB928233. In short the fix is to set a registry key. There are actually two different registry keys.

One of them allows you to try the current method (But broken with older routers), and if it fails it will try the old way:

DhcpConnEnableBcastFlagToggle

The other key allows you to bypass this entirely and totally switch back to the old XP way:

DhcpConnForceBroadcastFlag

Both of them are under the GUID of the network card in this registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\Interfaces\{GUID}

Neither of them solved my problem. I tried for quite some time different tricks to get Windows 7 to pickup an IP address from this old router with no success.

The final solution was to give the laptop a static IP address. Not the best, but at least he could get on the net.

The question is, have you ever seen this problem with Windows 7, or Vista? If so, how did you finally get it to work?

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Written by Steve Wiseman. Read more great feeds at is source WEBSITE
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