Networking · Windows

Network Connections Folder Is Empty: How to Get Your Adapters Back

By Muhd Radhi Wahab, Editor · Updated 25 August 2026 · Networking · Windows

The short answer

Check first whether the adapter is really gone or just not being drawn. Open Device Manager, or run Get-NetAdapter in PowerShell. If your adapter is listed there, the hardware and driver are fine and the Network Connections window is failing to render them — a different, and much more fixable, problem. Then work downwards: Microsoft’s network resets, the services the folder depends on, re-registering three networking DLLs, and only after all of that, the registry. The registry steps are last on purpose, and each one has a check that tells you whether it applies to your machine at all.

First: is the adapter actually gone, or just not being drawn?

This one check decides which half of the article you need, and it takes ten seconds. The Network Connections window is a view, and views can fail while the thing they are meant to show is perfectly healthy.

Open PowerShell and run:

Get-NetAdapter

Or open Device Manager (Windows+X, then Device Manager) and expand Network adapters.

Your adapter is listed. The hardware and the driver are fine. Windows can see the adapter; the Network Connections window just is not drawing it. Everything below applies to you.
Nothing is listed, or there is a device with a warning icon. This is a driver or hardware problem, not a shell problem. Reinstall the network driver from the PC or motherboard manufacturer, and check whether the adapter has been disabled in your firmware settings. The registry steps further down this page will not help.

Start with the resets — no registry editing required

These are Microsoft’s own first-line commands for network connection problems, and they fix a meaningful share of cases on their own. Run them from a Command Prompt or Terminal opened as administrator:

netsh winsock reset
netsh int ip reset
ipconfig /release
ipconfig /renew
ipconfig /flushdns

Restart before you judge the result

Microsoft is explicit that netsh winsock reset needs a restart to complete — its documentation tells you to restart the computer to finish resetting the Winsock catalog. Do not conclude the reset failed until you have rebooted and looked again. netsh int ip reset rewrites the TCP/IP registry keys to their defaults, which Microsoft describes as having the same effect as removing and reinstalling TCP/IP, so expect to reconfigure anything you had set manually — including a static IP address.

Check the services the folder depends on

The Network Connections window cannot populate if the services behind it are not running. Microsoft lists these, and the order matters because they depend on one another:

Remote Procedure Call (RPC) — must be running before the others can start
Network Connections — needs RPC
Plug and Play
COM+ Event System — needs RPC
Telephony — needs RPC and Plug and Play
Remote Access Connection Manager — needs Telephony

The service behind Network Connections is called netman. You can inspect it directly:

sc qc netman
Get-Service netman

A stopped netman is not automatically a problem

netman is configured as demand start — Manual, in the Services console — so it is supposed to sit stopped when nothing needs it. Plenty of guides tell you to panic at this point, or to switch it to Automatic. Do not bother. What matters is whether it starts successfully when something asks it to. If it tries and fails, Event Viewer will record the failure, and a Netlogon-style service error there is a real lead.

Re-register the three networking DLLs

If the adapters exist but nothing renders, the shell components that build the window are the obvious suspects. Microsoft documents re-registering these three, and warns to type them exactly. Run each from an elevated prompt:

regsvr32 netshell.dll
regsvr32 netcfgx.dll
regsvr32 netman.dll

Each one should produce a small success dialog. Restart afterwards and check the folder again with ncpa.cpl.

Before any registry step: back it up

Read this before you open regedit

Everything below this point edits the registry, and a mistake here can leave a machine that will not network or will not boot cleanly. Three rules:

Export before you change. In Registry Editor, right-click the key you are about to touch, choose Export, and save it somewhere you can find. Microsoft’s own instructions for this fix include that step.
Check the scope guard first. Each step below starts by telling you how to know whether it applies to your machine. If it does not, skip it — do not create values that were never there.
Change exactly one thing, then restart and re-test. If you change three things at once you will not know which one worked, or which one broke something else.

If you would rather not edit the registry at all, that is a reasonable position. Stop here and use Reset this PC with the option to keep your files, or the network reset in Settings.

The Config value — the one deletion Microsoft documents

This is the fix Microsoft publishes for a Network Connections window that opens empty, hangs, or closes immediately. The key is:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Network

Scope guard: look for a value named Config directly under that key. On a healthy Windows 11 machine we checked, Config was not present at all. Its absence is normal on modern Windows and is not itself the fault. If it is not there, this step does not apply to you — move on to the next section rather than creating it.

If Config is there, Microsoft’s instruction is to right-click the Network subkey and export it to a file first, then delete the Config entry — and, in Microsoft’s words, do not delete the Network subkey itself. The Config entry is reconstructed when you restart the computer.

Rename instead of delete

Community reports on the same fix note that renaming the value — to ConfigOld, say — makes Windows regenerate it just as deletion does, while keeping the original data recoverable. If you are nervous about the delete, that is the safer version of the same step.

One caveat we would rather you heard from us: Microsoft’s article on missing network connection icons is titled for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. Microsoft still maintains the page, and the Config step is sound, but it is an old article and not everything in it has aged well — see what we left out below.

The ClassManagers value

This one comes with an honest caveat about its provenance, because it is repeated everywhere as though it were documentation and it is not.

The origin is an archived TechNet blog post by a Microsoft engineer who traced an empty Network Connections folder with Process Monitor and found the netman service getting a buffer-overflow result when it read a value called ClassManagers. That is a personal engineering blog archived on Microsoft’s site, not Microsoft documentation, and the investigation was carried out on Windows 7. Every other site repeating this traces back to that one post.

The key is:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Network\Connections

Scope guard: this subkey carries tighter permissions than its parent, so you will need an elevated Registry Editor to read it at all. If there is no ClassManagers value inside, skip this step.

The reported failure mode is a formatting one. ClassManagers is a multi-string value, meaning each entry belongs on its own line, and the symptom is that the entries have collapsed onto a single line. The fix is to edit the value so that each GUID sits on a separate line — pressing Enter after each closing brace — and restart.

These four are the connection class managers. We can be confident about the strings themselves: three independent sources give them identically, and all four are registered on Windows 11 as exactly what their names suggest.

{B4C8DF59-D16F-4042-80B7-3557A254B7C5}    Bluetooth PAN Profile Class Manager
{BA126AD3-2166-11D1-B1D0-00805FC1270E}    LAN Connection Manager Class
{BA126AD5-2166-11D1-B1D0-00805FC1270E}    WAN Connection Manager Class
{BA126ADD-2166-11D1-B1D0-00805FC1270E}    Inbound Connection Manager Class

Do not treat “four” as the correct count

The claim that this value contains exactly these four entries is Windows 7-era evidence. We could not verify the count on Windows 10 or 11, and we are not going to assert it. Use the list above to recognise the entries and to fix line breaks between them — not as a target to make your machine match by adding or deleting GUIDs. If your machine lists something different, that is not proof of a fault.

Worth knowing too: on that same blog post, one commenter reported that fixing the line breaks did not resolve their problem, and that renaming Config did.

If you ever had a Cisco or SonicWall VPN client

This cause is narrow but, where it applies, decisive. Microsoft documents it in KB 3084164: older versions of some VPN clients install a filter driver called the Deterministic Network Enhancer, and an in-place upgrade to Windows 10 does not always upgrade it correctly. Microsoft names older versions of the Cisco VPN client and the SonicWall Global VPN client, and directs customers to their VPN vendor for a supported version.

Scope guard, and please actually do this one: open Registry Editor and look for HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{988248f3-a1ad-49bf-9170-676cbbc36ba3}. On a clean Windows 11 installation with no such software this key is simply not there — we confirmed that on a current build. If it is absent on your machine, this is not your problem. Stop here.

If the key is present, Microsoft’s commands are:

reg delete HKCR\CLSID\{988248f3-a1ad-49bf-9170-676cbbc36ba3} /f
netcfg -v -u dni_dne

Almost every other site prints this command wrongly

The version that circulates widely adds /va, giving reg delete … /va /f. Microsoft’s KB does not. And the difference is not cosmetic: Microsoft’s own reg delete reference defines /va as deleting all entries within the specified key — so it empties the key and leaves the key itself behind, where plain /f removes the key and everything under it.

That is very likely the explanation for the 0x80004002 error people report at the netcfg step: the leftover key is still there for netcfg to trip over. If you have already hit that error, delete the CLSID key manually in Registry Editor and run the netcfg command again. That error code appears nowhere in Microsoft’s KB, so treat it — and its workaround — as community-discovered rather than documented.

What we left out of Microsoft’s own article, and why

KB 825826 contains a set of “advanced methods” beyond the Config step. We checked them against a current Windows 11 build and two of them should not be followed any more. We are naming them rather than silently skipping them, because you will find them reproduced on plenty of other pages.

The COM interface check. The KB prints a GUID that is malformed — its final group has eleven hexadecimal digits where a GUID needs twelve. The step also tells you to create two subkeys if they are missing, and on Windows 11 only one of them exists at all, so following it would have you manufacture a registry key that modern Windows does not use.
The winmgmt /clearadap step. We checked, and winmgmt.exe on current Windows 11 does not support that switch. The step is obsolete. We are not substituting a replacement, because we could not confirm that any of the current switches does the same job.

If it is still empty

At this point the remaining realistic causes are outside the scope of a registry fix: a corrupted user profile (test by signing in as a different user), a third-party firewall or endpoint agent filtering the adapter list, or genuine system file damage. For the last of those, run these from an elevated terminal, in this order:

DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth
sfc /scannow

And if you got here because the network is broken rather than because the folder looks wrong, two related guides may be more directly useful: fixing “DNS server not responding” and flushing the DNS cache.

Frequently asked

Why is my Network Connections folder empty?

There are two quite different causes and it is worth separating them before you change anything. Either the adapters are genuinely absent, which is a driver or hardware problem, or they exist but the Network Connections window cannot draw them, which is a Windows shell problem. Device Manager and the Get-NetAdapter PowerShell command both look past the Network Connections window, so if your adapter appears in either of them the hardware is fine and you are dealing with the second case. Common causes of the second case are a corrupt Config value in the registry, damaged network shell DLL registrations, a stopped service the folder depends on, or a leftover VPN filter driver from an in-place upgrade.

Is it safe to delete the Config registry value?

It is the one registry deletion Microsoft actually documents for this symptom, and Microsoft states that Windows rebuilds the value when you restart. Two precautions matter. Export the Network key to a file before you change anything, which Microsoft also instructs. And delete only the Config value, never the Network key that contains it. Renaming the value instead of deleting it works the same way and is safer still, because the original data is preserved if you need it back.

The Config value does not exist on my PC. Is that the problem?

No, and this trips up a lot of people following older guides. We checked a healthy Windows 11 machine and the Config value was not present at all. Its absence is normal on modern Windows and is not itself the fault. If it is not there, that fix simply does not apply to you, and you should move on to the next step rather than creating the value yourself.

Should I run the netcfg command to remove the Deterministic Network Enhancer?

Only if that filter driver is actually on your machine, which it will not be unless you once had an older Cisco VPN client or SonicWall Global VPN client and upgraded Windows in place. Check for the CLSID first. On a clean Windows 11 install with no such software the key is simply absent, and if it is absent for you then this is not your problem and you should stop there rather than running the commands anyway.

The Network Connections service is stopped. Is that the fault?

Probably not. The service behind Network Connections is called netman, and it is set to start on demand rather than automatically, so it legitimately sits stopped when nothing is using it. A stopped netman on its own is not evidence of anything. What matters is whether it starts when it is needed and whether it errors when it tries, which is worth checking in Event Viewer if the folder is still empty after the earlier steps.

Where this came from

Written 25 August 2026. Because this page asks people to edit the registry, every path, value name, GUID and command on it was checked twice: once to find it, and once by an independent pass instructed to reject anything a second source did not confirm character-for-character. That process removed three things from Microsoft’s own KB 825826 as unsafe or obsolete for Windows 10 and 11, and corrected the version of the VPN filter-driver command that circulates on most other sites. Both are explained in place rather than quietly dropped.