NordVPN TAP Driver Error – Ultimate Solution [Updated 2023]
So you’ve got yourself NordVPN. You’ve been using it for a while without any issues. Then suddenly one day, you try connecting and nothing happens. You try over and over again still nothing works.
Well, my friend, have just encountered the TAP driver error. This windows error is hard to detect and prevents you from connecting to a server location.
Don’t worry though if all this sounds too confusing. In this super short guide, I’m going to explain exactly what a TAP driver error is and how you can fix TAP drive error when connecting to NordVPN.
So without further ado, let’s get started.
What is Tap-Windows 9.21.2
A Windows TAP diver is a special kind of network driver installed and used by most VPN applications. The version of the TAP driver depends on what version of Windows you’re using. Generally, you’ll come across two types of Windows TAP drivers which are:
- For NDIS 5 driver on Windows XP – (version 9.9.x)
- For NDIS 6 driver on Windows 10 / 8 / 7 / Vista – ( version 9.21.x)
To find out what version of TAP driver is installed on your computer, you can head over to your Device Manager and then Network adapters to see any or all TAP drivers associated with different VPNs installed on your computer.
As you can see from the screenshot above, I have a TAP-Windows Adapter installed for SurfEasy VPN. So now that you know what a TAP driver is and where you can find it, let’s see how you can fix NordVPN’s Tap Windows error.
How to Fix NordVPN TAP driver error?
As I said earlier, a TAP driver can be a sneaky Windows error. But sometimes, there can be other issues as well that prevent you from establishing a connection.
To be completely sure you’re experiencing the TAP driver error, you can run a diagnostic and check the connectivity logs from your NordVPN app. Here’s how you can do it:
- Launch your NordVPN app.
- Head over to Settings then Show advanced settings then Diagnostics and then finally click on Run Diagnostics Tool.
- Next, click on Collect Diagnostics to able to see whether your NordVPN app is suffering from the TAP driver error.
- To view diagnostic logs, launch the NordVPN app and browse through the installation folder to find the Diagnostics folder. usually, you should be able to find the folder at this address: C:\Program Files (x86)\NordVPN\.
- Once inside the folder, look for a .zip folder that shows the date of the recent diagnostics. For instance, it should look something like this: 2020-07-02 16_23_31Z-logs.zip.
- Now Double-click on the .zip folder and locate a file that starts with service and ends with .nwl. For example, service-2020-07-02.nwl.
- Once you find the file with the .nwl extension, open it with any text editor of your choice and look for the error message that says FATAL:All TAP-Windows adapters on this system are currently in use.
In case your diagnostic does end up showing the TAP driver error, the easiest fix is to restart the TAP adapter. To restart the NordVPN TAP driver, just follow the easy steps below:
1. Head over to your Control Panel then Network and Sharing Center and then click on Change Adapter Settings.
2. Now you should see TAP-NordVPN Windows Adapter v9.
3. You just need to disable it and re-enable it again to hopefully fix the TAP drive error when connecting to NordVPN.
In case this doesn’t fix your issue, you might be missing NordVPN’s TAP driver in the first place. To install or perhaps reinstall NordVPN’s TAP drivers for different versions of Windows, you can download them here:
If you are unable to fix this issue, then you can easily ask for a refund from NordVPN and switch to a different easy-to-use VPN service like ExpressVPN for your unblocking and privacy needs.
