Original: Microsoft Community
Symptom: After installing Bluesoleil, the network icon on the system tray shows a red X all the time regardless what the current state is with network connection
One cause: In my particular case, this problem was caused by conflicts between Bluesoleil and VPN software
Solution: Uninstall both Bluesoleil and VPN, and then install Bluesoleil first. If you need VPN, install VPN after Bluesoleil has been installed.
I'm writing this post to benefit people who might have this very same problem. There are a few similar threads in this forum, and there were not any real solutions, but they're all locked for updates. It is an annoying nuisance, but it could be very painful and costly if you want to resolve this problem. Since most of the solutions suggested involve fiddling with drivers and/or Windows Registry, you could brick your computer if you don't really know what you're doing. I'm an experienced software developer, so based on my experiences and instincts, I could tell those dozens of (if not more) suggestions from various forums if they had a chance to solve my problem. But even so, it costed me well over half a day to finally resolve this problem. Luckily I finally found the culprits and a relatively easy and unpainful solution.
Bluesoleil is a Bluetooth application provided with many cheap USB bluetooth dongles, especially for those ones made in China. It provides a rich set of BT stacks for supporting extensive BT functionalities. Thanks to the generic and poor BT support in MS Windows, Bluesoleil is one of very few solutions you can get if you want to make the more extensive BT functionalities work in the Windows environment.
I have a few USB BT dongles lying around. I use one of them sporadically simply for transferring files between various mobile devices and PC--it's easier than doing this via wired or wifi network connections for not very large files. The generic BT support in Windows suffices this need, so I've never bothered to use any 3rd party BT software. Recently I wanted to stream music from my mobile phone to PC, so I installed Bluesoleil. As soon as Bluesoleil was installed, the Windows network icon on the system tray became a BIG RED X. At first I thought there were problems with wifi and/or wired network connections, but it turned out that everything was working fine and it's just Windows showing the wrong network connection state.
There are a few question threads in this forum for this particular problem--links posted below, but none of the suggestions posted in those threads could resolve my particular problem. Though I wanted to post a reply to those threads, they are locked for updates.
It appears to me that there could be dozens of causes to this problem from all the suggestions I've seen. It turned out in my particular case, the problem was caused by conflicts between Bluesoleil and VPN software. I had two VPN programs installed on my computer, and they worked differently: one simply used Winsock filter drivers, and the other one (Ethersoft VPN) had a bunch of legacy drivers in addition to filter drivers. Either one of the two VPN programs would cause the red X issue if it was installed before Bluesoleil. The uninstallation program of Ethersoft VPN was a crap and it did not completely remove all the drivers. I had to manually unistall a driver and going through the Windows Registry to clean up the garbages it left behind. But after more than an hour working on manually cleaning up Ethersoft VPN, the issue was still there. Finally I found out I had another VPN software installed a long time ago. Removing this other VPN was simple and easy. And the red X went away as soon as all VPN programs were uninstalled.
If you encounter the same BIG RED X after installing Bluesoleil but you don't have any VPN program on your computer, you may want to check the following forums and see if any suggestion could solve your problem (but beware of the consequences of fiddling with drivers and/or Windows Registry if you don't really know what you're doing):
https://superuser.com/questions/661976/windows-7-shows-red-x-on-network-icon-but-im-connected
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