Forgot the permanent kill switch was on and uninstalled protonvpn. Now I can’t connect to the internet at all.
From the posts I’ve seen in this sub, this problem seems like a simple fix, just reset the network and/or router then restart the PC.
But so far I have tried resetting the network, resetting my router and all the fixes I could find in this subreddit. I did a network reset using the following admin cmd commands:
ipconfig /release
ipconfig /flushdns
ipconfig /renew
netsh winsock reset
netsh interface ipv4 reset
netsh interface ipv6 reset
And just in case those particular commands were just being funky, I tried it this way too:
Netsh int ip reset
Netsh winsock reset
But so far nothing has worked. At this point, I’m kinda lost. All of my other devices can connect to the internet just fine, and my PC could connect to the internet like normal before I uninstalled the VPN. Any help?
P.S. Running Windows 10 21H2
EDIT: I SOLVED IT!!! HERE’S HOW:
[LONG STORY, TL;DR AT END]
Ok so I’ve seen some comments saying that I should just reinstall the VPN and switch off the killswitch. I cannot do this - since I have no internet access on my PC I can’t download the VPN again, and even if I could somehow get the files on my PC again I will need to login to actually get to the VPN UI, but I can’t login because… no internet.
As a last ditch effort I tried something very, very out there. I wanted to download the VPN files again to see if there’s something I could do within the files to fix this. But I didn’t want to install the VPN on my other PC, so I instead tried to download the windows installer on my phone and then move the files over to my PC.
But here I encountered another issue, the website detected that I was on my phone and only showed a link to download the VPN from the Android PlayStore, even if I went to the page specifically meant for windows downloads. However, on this page, under the download from PlayStore button, I saw a bit of text that said “Using Windows 7, Windows 8/8.1 or a 32-bit version of Windows? Download Proton VPN here(new window).”
So I downloaded this older version of the proton installer and transferred the files over to my laptop. I installed the program, though it took a lot longer than normal. Then as I combed through the newly installed files I noticed that this older version of protonvpn has a little file called protonvpn.restoreinternet.exe. I ran it, it cleared all the WFP filers, I switched my wifi off then back on again and bad bing bada boom I have internet baby.
TL;DR: I downloaded the older/32 bit version of proton which has a file called protonvpn.restoreinternet.exe. I ran it and got internet access again.