Win7 WiFi Miniport Driver

Seems Win 7 has installed a "Virtual WiFi adapter" via WiFi Miniport Driver.
Since this functionality is not supported by any network adapter drivers I
have, is it safe to disable this feature to find out if it is the cause for
my Wireless Adapter (USB) randomly dropping out?

Thanks

 

Does your adapter work in Vista SP2?

--pa

 

My Linksys Dual-band Wireless USB adapter works fine in Vista, SP1, SP2, XP,
but crashes the OS when Win 7 attempts to reset it after it randomly drops
out. The errors typically point to inability to recover from sleep mode (but
the computer wasn't asleep.)

The PCI card (Wireless-N, nearly same model) works fine.

When I dual NIC'd the computer using both the PCI and USB devices
simultaneously, this Virtual Miniport Driver showed up in Device Manager.
The USB device continues to fail, so I removed it, but the Virtual Miniport
is still present. There are also several other "Hidden" Miniport drivers
that apparently don't really do anything other than confuse me as to what
may be momentarily running to kill the USB device.

So, I wanted to remove the virtual networking aspects to see if they were
part of the problem with the USB device.

 

Hi
If you look at the Device Manger under Network Adaptors and pull down "View/
Show Hidden Devices" you would see many such entries.
Those are Entries in the Registry and they should Not effect functional
Wireless working.
Contact Linksys' support and ask them if they are aware of incompatibility
with Win7.
Every time a new OS is on the horizon some vendors prepare themselves ahead,
others procrastinate past the last moment.
Jack (MS, MVP-Networking)

 

Checking Win 7 forums and Linksys, this is not a problem limited to Linksys,
but affects various wireless adapters. Wired adapters seem immune.

 

Have you tried to bridge the USB and PCI cards?
Then the "Virtual Miniport" could be the bridge driver.

--pa

 

I did not try to bridge these cards.