KB41014 - HP 840 G3 laptop wireless adapter gets disabled after establishing a VPN tunnel connection using Pulse

This article describes an issue that occurs with specific HP laptop builds that run HP hotkeys software with WLAN switching enabled in the BIOS where the HP hotkeys software disables the native wireless adapter once the Pulse client is connected.

This issue is specific to the following software/hardware configurations:

• Laptop is an HP G1 or G3 (various models) laptop with WLAN switching turned on in the BIOS.
• Laptop uses Intel's 8260 wireless adapter hardware and driver software
• HP Hotkey Support software is installed prior to version 6.2.35.10.
• Operating system is Windows 10 
• Pulse connection is launched over wireless connection.  

 

Findings:

• Pulse Secure worked closely with HP and Intel on this issue to determine the problem. 
• The root cause was found to be with Intel's 8260 wireless adapter driver that reports itself incorrectly to HP's WLAN switching feature which is installed using HP's HotKey Support software.
• HP's Hotkey Support software detects the Pulse Secure virtual adapter as a physical wireless adapter, thereby disconnecting the native wireless adapter when WLAN switching is activated. 
• This causes the VPN connection with Pulse to fail because there was no longer an interface connected to the Internet. 
• Once Pulse's virtual adapter is installed on the PC the native wireless adapter does not automatically reconnect to the network once a Pulse VPN connection has been attempted, and must be manually reconnected.

HP provided a fix for this in their Hotkey software version 6.2.35.10.

To resolve this issue with HP laptops, download and install the latest version of HP Hotkey Support from https://support.hp.com/us-en/drivers by specifying the HP laptop model then selecting the HP Hotkey Support download in the Software-Solutions section.  

If customers are experiencing similar issues with BIOS WLAN switching from other laptop vendors, we recommend reporting the issue to the laptop vendor first, using the information in this article to help explain the problem.  As per the root cause, the issue is related to the BIOS WLAN feature causing the Pulse Secure virtual adapter to be reported to the network stack incorrectly as a physical adapter, when connecting over the wireless card, which causes the Pulse Secure adapter to get disabled once WLAN switching is activated.