When staying at a public place, such as a hotel, a client’s laptop could connect to the Wi-Fi but was unable to perform anything over the Internet.  For example, trying to browse anywhere would provide an error message like this:

 This site can’t be reached
 www.msftconnecttest.com took too long to respond.

Windows sometimes performs an action called “Active Probing” to check if a path to the Internet exists before it even tries to send traffic over it. This “probing” involves sending an HTTP request to www.msftconnecttest.com and seeing if it returns a proper response. If it doesn’t, this error is displayed and Internet traffic is blocked.

Public WiFi often uses a captive portal that displays a page for people to authenticate themselves in some way, like a hotel room number, before its DNS will resolve anything. Thus, www.msftconnecttest.com will provide no IP address, even for the captive portal page.

We can disable the “Active Probing” here:

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\NlaSvc\Parameters\Internet

Change the value for EnableActiveProbing from 1 to 0 to disable it and it should start working immediately.

In some instances, the above wasn’t enough. We performed these additional steps to resolve it:

1. Removed all McAfee programs. Note that some of these only appear in the list of Installed Apps and not in the
   Add/Remove programs list in the Control Panel.
2. Reset the Internet Options via Control Panel > Network and Internet > Internet Options and, on the Advanced tab, click Restore advanced Settings, then click Apply > OK.
3. Reset the network via Settings > Network & Internet > Advanced network settings and click on Network Reset (the computer will then restart itself.

After this, browsing to an IP address such as 142.250.75.238 brought up the captive portal’s sign-on page.