<em id="__mceDel" style="font-size: 1.5em;">Unable to connect to Cisco AnyConnect VPN Client on Windows 8? The fix is simple!</em>

I usually like to stay on the bleeding edge of software releases, so naturally as soon as Windows 8 RTM was announced and was made available to developers such as myself on MSDN, I wanted to take full advantage of learning the extra capabilities – I created a development machine to be able test the environment and was getting it ready to move live.

The problem for me was that there were a few business-critical applications that were not playing well with Windows 8. We have a customer that requires us to use Cisco AnyConnect VPN Client – specifically version 2.5.0217.

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Upon connecting to a VPN, I would either get a <b>The VPN client driver has encountered an error</b> message or a blue screen forcing a reboot.

To fix this, a simple registry change will save the day. (Note, you should always back up the registry before making changes)

Run <b>Regedit</b>

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Navigate to <b>HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\vpnva</b>

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Change <b>DisplayName</b> to <i>Cisco AnyConnect VPN Virtual Miniport Adapter for Windows x64</i>, basically you want to remove the beginning inf% information before the word Cisco.

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Close RegEdit (and the VPN client, if it is open) and reopen and attempt connection.

If you aren’t <i>required</i> to use a lower version of the AnyConnect VPN Client, you should be able to use version 3.0 or above without any issue.

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Shayne Estes is an Application Services Engineer at eGroup, Inc.

Contact Shayne via email here.