DUN VPN error 31, A device attached to the system is not functioning
on May 22nd, 2009 at 9:58 pmI use VPN connections a lot to administer to my clients networks and systems so I see a lot of problems that most people never do. I just recently had a new issue come up on my 64bit Vista workstation, the water cooled one.
I suddenly started getting “Error 31: A device attached to the system is not functioning” on every VPN connection I tried. Usually I invoke last event syndrome and can attribute the problems beginning to the last thing I updated or installed but this time I hadn’t made any changes to the system. I don’t know what really happened to the DUN (Dial Up Networking) but I sure couldn’t connect to a single VPN.
I found this little RA (Remote Access) repair tool that is said to come from a Microsoft engineer and was intended for NT4.0 but to be for sure, I couldn’t say. 
Download it from here: rarepair.zip
You should run rarepair.exe with administrative privilege. In Vista, right click on it and select “Run as Administrator”. I don’t know what it does or how it does it but it worked for me and solved the problem. I didn’t have time to monitor it and see exactly what it does. It appears to remove the RA configuration from the registry, reboots the computer, and re-installs RA, and then reboots again.
Some people have said you have to remove modem and network drivers and VPN connections from your network connections before you run this but I didn’t and it worked for me. I’d try it first without removing anything.
- Cory L Curtis
(2009-05-22)
UPDATE: 2009-05-29
Well, I wrote too soon. The Error came back but this time as “Error 609: A device type was specified that does not exist”. First it wasn’t functioning and now it doesn’t exist at all. I tried the rarepair again but it didn’t change a thing this time but it worked initially on the 22nd. What I ended up doing was use the System Restore back to the begining of last week. That set things right again thank goodness because I use my VPN connections a lot and have about 20 or more setup for client network access.
I noticed that if I set the VPN type to PPTP or L2TP I’d get Error 800. Strange but so is Windows anyhow.
- Cory L. Curtis
I found an alternate solution here for “error 31″ but haven’t had a need to try it since the system restore.
http://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=1199801&page=3
