Can’t Open Network and Sharing Center

I’ve never ran into this issue on Windows Vista or Windows 7 on my own computer, but my roommate had a problem with their new laptop where trying to access the Network Adapters or Network Connections dialogs would just result in a hang and you would have to close the window. When trying to automatically connect to a wireless network, the loading icon didn’t even spin, it just sat there. Really quirky, right?

Well, I found a couple suggestions on the world wide webs, and here’s what worked for me, a simple one liner in the command prompt, a quick registration of a DLL file, and BAM, they were back online!

Open a command prompt with administrator privileges and type this in:

regsvr32 netcenter.dll

Once you hit the ENTER key and it returns with a success message, give your computer a restart and you should be back online.

If this didn’t work for you, you can try to reboot into safe mode (reboot and hit f8 while your computer is booting up, and select safe mode from the menu) and once you are in, open a command prompt with administrator privileges and type this in:

net localgroup “Administrators” “local Service” /add

Once you’ve entered it in and you see a success message, reboot your computer and cross your fingers!