• Virtual Wifi Filter Driver
• Vwififlt
• Microsoft Virtual Wifi Filter Driver

The Virtual Machine Network Driver allows the Device emulator's OS (or even the Virtual PC OS, as the case may be) to emulate its own network connection. Because the physical network interface on the host machine is now 'virtualized,' you have a way to get two IP Addresses - one for the host PC, and one for the operating system that is running. How can the answer be improved?

Windows 7 has a (neat?) new feature called a 'virtual wireless adapter'. Read about it here:

I have an application that directly controls the windows wifi interface card using the Native Wifi API ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms706556%28VS.85%29.aspx ). Please take as a given for this question that I need to directly control the wifi adapter using this documented api and can't just leave it up to OS and user.

The Windows 7 virtual adapter is supposed to be included with any approved Windows 7 wifi drivers. The drivers that out there now seem to be pretty buggy, and I've found that unless I manually disable the virtual wifi adapter the real adapter will not reliably connect to a wireless access point when commanded by the WLAN api.

My main question is 'How to I detect the presence of a windows virtual wifi adapter?'

Note that the documentation for WlanEnumInterfaces says:

This virtual device normally shows up in the “Network Connections Folder” as ‘Wireless Network Connection 2’ with a Device Name of ‘Microsoft Virtual WiFi Miniport adapter’ if the computer has a single wireless network adapter. This virtual device is used exclusively for performing software access point (SoftAP) connections and is not present in the list returned by the WlanEnumInterfaces function .

I suspect there is shell api that might provide the enumeration that the control panel uses to display the virtual adapter.

For extra credit, how can I disable this adapter programatically?

Thanks in advance.

Virtual Wifi Filter Driver

2 Answers

To detect the Windows 7 virtual adapter with the WLAN api you need to use the version defined by wlanapi.h in Windows SDK version 6.1.

You can enable or disable network adapters by using WMI or the INetConnection COM interface defined in netcon.h .

Vwififlt

In the control panel > Network and Internet there's an option that says: 'add a wireless device'. I used that to detect the microsoft virtual wifi miniport adapter, cause after I installed Windows 7 it didn't appear in the network adapters but it was there and enabled, but not started.To disable it from a command prompt run as administrator you could try:netsh wlan set hostednetwork mode=disallow(or disallowed, I haven't tried). See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd815243%28VS.85%29.aspx

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• VWIFIFLT.SYS Information

  This is a valid program that is required to run at startup.

  This program is required to run on startup in order to benefit from its functionality or so that the program will work. The following information is a brief description of what is known about this file. If you require further assistance for this file, feel free to ask about in the forums.

• Virtual WiFi Filter Driver
• vwififlt.sys
• C:WindowsSystem32DRIVERSvwififlt.sys
• Driver for various wireless network cards.
• %System%DRIVERSvwififlt.sys
• This startup entry is installed as a Windows service.
• vwififlt
• Virtual WiFi Filter Driver
• %System% is a variable that refers to the Windows System folder. By default this is C:WindowsSystem for Windows 95/98/ME, C:WinntSystem32 for Windows NT/2000, or C:WindowsSystem32 for Windows XP/Vista/7.
• This entry has been requested 22,723 times.

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Microsoft Virtual Wifi Filter Driver

This is NOT a list of tasks/processes taken from Task Manager orthe Close Program window (CTRL+ALT+DEL) but a list of startup applications,although you will find some of them listed via this method. Pressing CTRL+ALT+DEL identifies programsthat are currently running - not necessarily at startup.Therefore, before ending a task/process via CTRL+ALT+DEL just because it has an 'X' recommendation,please check whether it's in MSCONFIG or the registry first.An example would be 'svchost.exe' - which doesn't appear in either under normal conditions but does via CTRL+ALT+DEL.If in doubt, don't do anything.