all my network adapters have disappeared

Win7 x64 - little backstory to explain how i got here...

This was a vista machine that i upgraded to win7. Everything worked after the upgrade except for hamachi (version 1). I did a reinstall of that and it fixed it, except i had 2 hamachi network interfaces listed in device manager, one of which was showing up as broken (yellow exclamation mark). Since everything was working i left it alone.

Fast forward to today - i tried to upgrade hamachi to hamachi 2. Seemed to work ok but i couldn't connect to any peers. Looking into it it said the hamachi adapter was faulty and looking at my network connections there was no hamachi adapter listed.

I opened device manager and there was just one hamachi nic listed and it was the broken one. I selected uninstall - checked the box to remove the driver and it uninstalled.

I then manually installed another instance of the hamachi network adapter. Hamachi still cant connect to peers - same error msg about the network adapter.

Only now, ALL of my network adapters are missing in the network connections folder. And the network status icon in the status tray is showing a red X as though it's not connected, even though this PC is online (i'm connecting to it through RDP).

I've already tried rebooting - no effect. So any ideas where all my network connections/adapters went and how to get this all sorted?

Edit: One more piece of info - if i right click on the network icon in the status tray and select troubleshoot, having another problem, specific adapter - on that screen it then lists 3 network adapters. Tried letting it diagnose all of them but no effect.

And if i open the network connections folder and go to help, advanced options, i get an 'unexpected error'

So as a test i re-enabled the onboard NIC from the mobo. After re-enabling it, device manager indicated it was working. I then tried uninstalling it completely, including checking the option to uninstall drivers.

I downloaded the latest drivers and tried reinstalling the NIC after a reboot - now windows is saying it's not working.

So i'm really hesitant to uninstall the other NIC since i'm worried it too will also show up as not working and then i'll be screwed.

Any suggestions?

I have this exact issue...

Even down to the Hamachi going awol...
the only network adapters I am left with is Bluetooth and a VPN to the office...
everything works fine but when i change networks (work/client-site) i have to use the NETSH commands to get new ip addresses on their networks as I cannot edit (because i cannot see) the Lan or Wifi adapters on the laptop.
This happened before and a system restore brought the adapters back but this time it hasent
I have spent days trying to find the problem/solution but have got nowhere fast... if you have a solution them i would love to hear all about it.. in the meantiime the NETSH command (or a reload of the OS!) is about the only solution...

You guys might want to read this blog on the pitfalls of using Hamachi with Windows 7. It's not working too well at all with Windows 7 and this certainly isn't a Windows 7 problem.

Hamachi 2 with Windows 7 - LogMeIn Community

I wound up doing an in-place upgrade, which is basically just reinstalling windows on top of itself. That fixed the issue. And I have to say that blog post is incorrect, since i have hamachi 2 working on 3 different windows 7 machines and working on two windows 2008 r2 servers.

The sole issue for me with windows 7 and hamachi was in having hamachi 1 installed on vista, and then upgrading vista to win7. After that the hamachi virtual network adapter wasn't working. And either reinstalling hamachi causes a problem, or uninstalling it causes a problem. So for my specific problem, the real solution would have been to uninstall hamachi before upgrading vista. And then reinstall after the upgrade.

I still think there must be a better fix then doing the in-place upgrade. There has to be some way to reset the networking.