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SOLVED - No 'Connect To A Network' window in Windows Vista

This fix was done on Windows Vista Home Premium 32 bit

Problem

My customer complained that they could not get online when using a wireless internet connection. I checked it out and found that the 'Connect to a Network' window was completely unavailable. There are various ways you can get to this window, like right clicking the connection icon in the taskbar and choosing 'Connect to a Network' or choosing this option from the tasks in the left hand menu of the Network and Sharing Center. None of these options worked, they were not disabled they just didn't open the window that they were supposed to.

Another symptom of this problem was when you went into 'Manage Wireless Networks' and tried to add a network maually by clicking the 'Add' button. Once again this resulted in no activity and the 'Manually connect to a wireless network' dialogue box did not open up.

Solution

Once again the solution was the trusty disk scan followed by system restore.

I tried a few things first like reinstalling the drivers for the wireless adapter and running a quick disk check. The thing that worked in the end was a full disk check (including a check for surface errors) followed by a system restore to a time previous to the date the problem occurred.

I suspect this was caused by a problem during windows update as that seemed to be all that had happened at the point when the error occurred. I used the windows utility to check the disk (Instructions here.)

After scanning the disk I checked the logs and it found no bad sectors but did make some minor adjustments to the file system. After this, I did a system restore, the dialogue box returned and all was working normally.

All that remained to do then was to run the windows update untill all the latest patches had been successfully installed. I did to make sure that the problem would not re-occur once the patch that had caused the initial problem was installed again. It didn't and all was well.

I hope this is of some help to someone. Thanks, Ste Edgoose