Windows 7 wireless service not working as expected

Question

I have this one issue, which I'm hopeful you guys will help me out with...

I use a plugin we have created for IE... It detects devices over the network... Devices are the ones that we ourselves have created... Now this plugin works fine and detects devices when it is wired with the Ethernet on our Subnet in XP as well as Windows 7... It detects devices when it is connected Wirelessly over our Subnet in Windows XP... But when I connect it with my Wireless subnet over Windows 7 it stops discovering the devices... The moment I enable my LAN it again detects the devices... It's behaves very stange on this part and I can't be sure that Windows 7 is responsible for this but it had to be considered... There seems like a wireless security affecting it but there is no such proof as off now...

I'm not fully aware of the plugin code but it uses mDNSresponder service over the network...

I use Windows 7 64-bit OS and Internet Explorer 9... The tests have been made over Windows 7 32-bit and IE version 8 and 9, to give the same outcome... Windows firewall has been turned on/off as well...

I'm sorry if I've posted over a wrong thread, please forgive me for any inconsistencies... Any help is appreciated... Thanks...

EDIT-1: The plugin has been built with C++ and I could give you the code for it as well but the point is that it does not get involved here... It seems like an issue over Wireless in Windows 7... I used Wireshark to sniff the packets over the network and found out that there while running in a wired network I can see requests and responses over the MDNS protocol... But when I switch to Wireless network there is no request or response over MDNS and hence there is no query sent only over the network... Seems like when I connect with the Wireless network, something blocks the plugin from querying the network... Help me out with this if possible... Thanks so much...

Answer 1

Ok the issue is solved... The problem was that my program was not being able to find the IEEE 802.11 wireless network interface... Since the dawn of Vista, Windows has changed some it its architecture and my program was made years before that...

Before Vista, the network adapter type value for Ethernet and IEEE wireless was same i.e 6 and is known as MIB_IF_TYPE_ETHERNET... But now they both have been differentiated and IEEE wireless adapter gets a new value 71 named IF_TYPE_IEEE80211... In our code we had a validation to reject network adapters other than MIB_IF_TYPE_ETHERNET and so it used to work with XP, but Windows 7 had other plans... Adding another validation for IF_TYPE_IEEE80211 solved the problem.

You can check out the below link to get more clarity over this and let me know if you've any queries... http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa366062%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

Cheers...