Vista Goes Bad: Dial-Up or Denial-Up Networking?
6 March 2008 in Phones & Updates and Fixes | Comments enabled
Sigh, some issues in Vista can have strange consequences. About a week and a half ago, I couldn’t my mobile broadband anymore since Vista’s own dial-up networking feature went bonkers. The problem appeared right in the dialing sequence, after showing “Dialing *99#”, the DUN showed “Verifying user name and password”. Right then, wham!: “Vista couldn’t connect to…” error message popped up. That was strange, since the phone’s own Internet applications were able to connect to the net and download mail, websites and podcasts without any hitch.
Shuffle the Cards and Drivers, Please
So, I was thinking the problem was caused by a corrupt driver for my Nokia 6120 Classic. I reinstalled, deleted, reinstalled, rebooted, tried some voodoo, rebooted, and every possible scenario that I tried failed miserably. Testing dialing up using another Vista (64-bit, same edition, SP1 patched) computer everything worked just fine! Testing with a Nokia E90 (Communicator) failed on my own Acer Ferrari, but worked on the other Vista computer.
“What on earth?”, I thought to myself. Trying to connect via “Manage Network Connections” in Vista showed me the problem: Error 31 — A device attached to the system is not functioning. Quite funny, as in reality the drivers were working, the system wasn’t.
The Operating System Attached to the System is not Functioning
Solution: Repair install… sorry, it’s called upgrade install in Vista. I used the excellent guide from Vistax64.com for my endeavors, and it worked this time around. 
You should know that you might want to check that you’ve got 15 gigabytes of free space and a recent backup copy of all of your files before you try to repair install Vista using the upgrade path. Supposedly, if you have installed SP1 and have a pre-SP1 disc, then you can’t use the disc to do do an upgrade reinstall but you have to uninstall SP1 to be able to use it. However, I happened to have a SP1 disc handy, and the upgrade install worked without a hitch using it.
Other than waiting for the upgrade reinstall to complete (took over two hours for me), the system as a whole seemed to function much, much better. Maybe something had gone and broken it self, or Vista was just feeling down from me testing those SP1 release candidates.
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