Killswitch is Blocking All My Internet

VPN
1

TL;DR, enabled killswitch a couple weeks back. Seemed like a logical and helpful choice.

Well, yesterday I left my VPN on while doing some p2p file-sharing. I woke up in the middle of the night, and the share had finished. Was half-drunk and half-asleep still, so just manually shut down my computer without thinking.

This morning, my PC won’t connect to the internet at all. Basic troubleshooting identified that it’s the PIA Firewall (from the killswitch, presumably) blocking the internet access.

So it clicked: I manually shut down without disconnecting the VPN, so PIA took it as a sudden interruption/breach and triggered the killswitch.

Problem is now I can’t turn it off or get my internet back. I can’t disable the killswitch in the program settings because the program can’t communicate to the internet (stuck with the spinning loading circle for over an hour now).

I googled this issue and was told a system restore is an easy fix, but my 3 attempts so far have failed because the System Restore wasn’t able to successfully complete. I have no idea why, but it’s completely unrelated issue. Point is, system restore is not an option.

So I tried more googling and there was tall about connecting via the command prompt, executing some commands to the piactl.exe file via command line, and a “background off” command to turn background connection and the killswitch off. I tried it, did not work. The command keeps failing and timing out. Double and triple checked I was executing it properly.

I’m losing my mind here as to how to turn off the killswitch and get my internet back (which is working fine on all other devices FYI)

My ideas:
-Uninstall PIA completely (use Revo), get rid of the trace files, and hope that makes the killswitch go away. BUT I fear if this DOESNT work, now the firewall will be stuck on and PIA won’t even be installed for me to tamper with or try to fix in some other way

-Total system wipe. Clean windows install. Would take an annoying amount of time to backup all my important files, and the set up the computer again… but if all else fails, it’ll be the last hope.

I’m sorry for the wall of text but I’m at my wits end.

Help, I’m begging

EDIT: Just uninstalled PIA, used Revo to completely wipe all leftover files, and restarted the PC. Still the same problem. Used the troubleshooter and… yup, despite being supposedly completely gone and leftover files wiped, PIA Firewall still is blocking the internet connection. And now PIA is uninstalled so I can’t do anything to it.

2

This happened to me and i just reinstalled PIA and reconnected to the internet and disconnected. I’m not sure why it didn’t work for you.

3

Try going into Device Manager and deleting all MiniPort WAN and NIC devices. The have it rescan and find all the hardware again. I would think this will delete the changes that have been applied by the kill switch.

4

You don’t need the killswitch if you’re bound to your torrent client.

5

The only thing I can think of is check your default network connection\adapter settings.

Control Panel\Network and Internet\Network Connections

Go to it’s properties, then select the Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4) and click Properties.

Write down any values that are there, in case you need to roll back the changes.

Select the Obtain an IP address automatically and Obtain DNS server address automatically.

If you have the IPv6 enabled, do the same there.

See if that will do the trick.

P.S. Also, since you uninstalled the PIA check if there’s a remaining PIA adapter there and if there is, delete it.

6

Can you connect to a different Wi-Fi, like hotspot from your phone?

7

I haven’t Uninstalled PIA yet. Because like I said in the post, I’m afraid that if I do and it doesn’t fix it, I’m gonna be completely fucked. Won’t even be able to try to tweak settings or anything if it’s Uninstalled (and no way to reinstall without internet oof)

8

Noted. But I need to figure out how to fix this and get my internet back before I can take that advice.