I had a problem with my wireless internet connection on Windows last night. Although I could list, and even connect with, various WiFi portals, there was no connection to the internet. I would get a “Limited Access” message on my selected WiFi connection.

It turns out it was my Vagrant VM that was causing the problem. Sometime before I noticed the problem I remember having some problems with my Vagrant VM. I remember trying to start up Vagrant and being told that a copy was already started. Since the current copy of Vagrant was not responding I remember doing a ‘kill -9′ on the process to get the old one stopped. My guess is that this left my computer in an odd state. (If a reader has other guesses as to what caused your problem, please let me know.)

In any case this is how I got it working again. First go to:

Control Panel > Network and Sharing Center > Change Adapter Settings

Right click on the connection you are having a problem with. In my case it was “Wireless Network Connection”. On this menu select “Properties”.

You should then see something like this:

Notice there is a line here that says “Virtual Box Bridged Networking Driver”. This is Vagrant watching the connection, is my guess.

When I unchecked the box in front of “Virtual Box Bridged Networking Driver” my internet connection started working again.

Now at this point I started using Google to find out what was going on. I never found a solution or reason. After searching I rechecked the box. And everything started working again.

I should note that I did not have Vagrant running at the time. I was on a clean reboot.

I also found that Vagrant had the same problem on my hard-wired connection (called “Local Area Connection” on my computer). So I needed to un-check and re-check the box on this one, too. You may find that Vagrant has affected a number of your internet connections that you will need to reset.