In an earlier blog entry here, I shared my pain of 32-bit Vista Blue Screens of Deaths (BSODs) with Cisco VPN Client. While most of those pains are gone ever since I installed 5.0.0.0340, I suddenly could not connect to the corporate VPN Server that needless to mention I have always been connecting to over past several months.
When I would attempt to connect, the VPN client would not prompt for user name or password and would just give authentication failures (413s I think) and bail. Since some corporate emails had gone back and forth about the VPN server being down, I assumed that may be the server was silently upgraded and I have the old client now. This is one major issue that VPN users all around the globe might be faced with, which is why it is imperative that you tread carefully. VPN is a risky business. Read All about Usenet newsgroups at gratisnieuwsgroepen.nl, when in doubt. (Lees alles over Usenet nieuwsgroepen op gratisnieuwsgroepen.nl).
So I started googling around and sure enough I found that Cisco has released 5.0.01.0600 that among other things addresses two local previlege escalation vulnerabilities in 5.0.00.0340. All the more reason to upgrade and see if it works better.
When I unzipped and ran the installer, it gave me the following message.
I went ahead and closed the Cisco tray application and started installation again. This time it asked me to uninstall 5.0.0.0340 altogether before running 5.0.01.0600 installer. One would think this error would be before the first error but for some odd reason it is not. So I removed the 5.0.0.0340 Cisco VPN client from my box through Add/Remove Programs control panel applet. The uninstall did not prompt for reboot so went onto starting 5.0.01.0600 installation again.
Now I was greeted with regular installation wizard and installation completed with some fast window popups in between that I don’t think I ever saw during the previous installs. In any case the installation prompted for reboot and I promptly obliged. After logging in, I wanted to check whether the upgrade was good. So I chose “About VPN Client…” menu after right clicking on the Cisco system tray lock icon. It showed me the version to be indeed 5.0.01.0600 but it would always show the dialog on the top left of my desktop.
I then realized that I cannot see the VPN client GUI on my desktop. Every time I click on it in the task bar, it would seem like there is some movement of some sort but I would see nothing. The only way around it was to right click on the taskbar and choose Maximize. It looks like Cisco has some bugs to fix perhaps with window coordinate calculations but once I found my connection entry spanning the entire desktop and there was only one thing left to do – attempt to connect to VPN server again.
And voila it worked like a charm. And the joy of being on corporate Virtual Private Network returned 🙂 You can find the Cisco 5.0.01.0600 readme here and installer here. If you are looking for Vista compliant VPN Client from another vendor or waiting for 64-bit client to be available (5.0.01.0600 does not support 64-bit Vista), here is a support article that may help.
The latest VPN client seems to be 5.0.03.0530. You can install it from here or here
You can install slightly older version 5.0.02.0090 from here.
5.0.06.0160 can be installed from here or here.
5.0.04.0300 can be installed from here or here.
5.0.03.0560 can be installed from here or here. There is a 5.0.03.0560 readme here. Vista update KB952876 is required before upgrading to or installing this version of cisco client.
If you are getting IP conflict errors when connecting to VPN, 5.0.03.0560 is the upgrade that resolved it for me (I was on 5.0.02.0900).
Does anyone know if there is a VPN client now that supports 64-bit Vista? Thanks.
Cisco is not planning on a Vista 64-bit client. One has to upgrade to AnyConnect.
I can not fully uninstall VPN Client from vista business machine. Does not show in control panel. I’ve tried the regedit instructions on cisco’s site. Currently, I can not install anything because it says that I must uninstall previous version first. Any Ideas?
Assuming you are attempting to upgrade to 5.0.04.0300 from 5.0.03.560, sometimes the installer drops you off when it says it is successful but the install directories do not have the binaries !! The installer may prompt for reboot and then would seem to auto-launch itself when you login. It also comes up with strange ominous looking errors if you rerun the installer. But eventually I was able to install it 3rd/4th time I tried.
Your situation seems to be different however. What version ? What operating system ? Have you tried using process monitor from sysinternals to narrow down what the installer might be finding in your registry/file system ?