[Mashiro]

I have one thing to add about Windows 7 and VPN. Whatever VPN client you run you want to make sure it actually starts as Administrator (Remember the "Run as Administrator" entry on right click?). OpenVPN needs this because if you launch it normally even as a user with administrative rights it won't work. It won't have access to the command line tools of Windows to change network settings, assign IP addresses and etc to the TUN/TAP adapter and so on. It just errors and doesn't connect. A lot of VPN clients from providers like PureVPN, ExpressVPN and etc use OpenVPN actually in the background (behind the fancy GUI).

This was one issue I was fighting with very often in the past on Windows 7. Just found out about that permission issue through research. It wasn't there from the very beginning... Microsoft introduced it with a update that ought to improve security and it kinda does but it's annoying to some applications now need to be even started with "Run as Administrator" to get them working despite being logged in as a user with administrative rights.